“This world is but canvas to our imaginations.”
Variant: The world is but a canvas to the imagination.
Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Wednesday
“A thousand forms and passions glow
Upon the world-wide canvas.”
The Ancient And Modern Muses
Context: A thousand forms and passions glow
Upon the world-wide canvas. So
With larger scope our art we ply;
And if the crown be harder won,
Diviner rays around it run,
With strains of fuller harmony.
"The American Action Painters" (1952) in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22; then published in Tradition of the New, 1959.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)
Quote of Boudin in a letter to his brother, 1857; as cited in the descritption of 'The Pardon of Saint-Anne-La-Palud' by the Met-museum https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/744059]
Boudin described in his typical way the scene of the sacred procession of the Pardon of Saint-Anne-la-Palud, a major religious festival in Brittany, that he witnessed in 1857
1850s - 1870s
“This world of imagination is the world of eternity.”
A Vision of the Last Judgment
1810s
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 1: The Motive For Metaphor http://northropfrye-theeducatedimagination.blogspot.ca/2009/08/1-motive-for-metaphor.html
Context: At the level of ordinary consciousness the individual man is the centre of everything, surrounded on all sides by what he isn't. At the level of practical sense, or civilization, there's a human circumference, a little cultivated world with a human shape, fenced off from the jungle and inside the sea and the sky. But in the imagination anything goes that can be imagined, and the limit of the imagination is a totally human world.
“The whole answer is there on the canvas.”
Hopper's answer to journalists - quoted by Sherry Maker, in 'Edward Hopper' (1990)
1941 - 1967
“Imagination governs the world.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
In a conversation with Pierre Loeb, circa 1946; as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255,
1940 - 1948, Various sources
