Imagination

“ You see what is the extent of imagination: it has no limits, it is applied to all things. Its distinctive character is that of deeply moving the soul in the presence of a beautiful object, or by its remembrance alone, or even by the idea alone of an imaginary object. ”

“ My imagination presents to me anything but a vivid image of this glorious structure, and when art presents an imitation of it, to my eye it awakens in me no sensation and I am unable to judge of the merits of the picture. ”

“ For the imagination, playing upon fact and experience, divines their meaning and puts us in possession of the truth and life that are in them. To possess this magical power is to live the whole of life and to enter into the heritage of history. ”

“ His imagination helps itself from the things that remain; he tries to see the life of the sixteenth century in its form and dress—its turbulence, its passions, its loves and hates, its treacheries, falsities, sincerities, faith, its latitude of personal development, its presentation of the whole nature, its nobleness of costume, charm of speech, splendour of taste, unequalled picturesqueness. ”

“ As to the imagination,—that mysterious faculty which not only gives life to the real world, but possesses an inexhaustible activity in creating new worlds of its own, displaying before the eyes of the soul rich and splendid panoramas; why should it desert the soul on its separation from the body? ”

“ When imagination is awake and flinging forth her airy fictions, bodies things unseen, and clothes reality in loveliness not of earth! When a scene like this is developed, what shall adequately depict it? ”

“ Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of fact. But it came so home to me—I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul’s thought. ”

“ A careful analysis of every act of the imagination will show, I think, a sensible basis as the groundwork of the fabric—something seen, or heard, or felt—something said or done—some sensible reality—something which, however ideal and transcendental in itself and in reality, yet admits of expression in and through the senses; otherwise it were a mere conception or abstraction—a mere idea—not an imagination. ”

“ So imagination crowns the experience of my hands. And they learned their cunning from the wise hand of another, which, itself guided by imagination, led me safely in paths that I knew not, made darkness light before me, and made crooked ways straight. ”

“ The imagination has the command over all its ideas, and can join, and mix, and vary them in all the ways possible. ”

“ A glowing consciousness of existence diffuses itself to the very extremities; and, while thus yielding to the most delightful sensations, ideas of the most pleasing [50] kind pervade and fill the soul; the imagination wanders through worlds which itself embellishes, everywhere drawing pictures of happiness and delight. ”

“ These latter persons prefer this twilight of obscure ideas, where the feelings have more intensity, and the imagination can at will create convenient chimeras, to the rays of truth which put to flight the pleasant illusions of their dreams. ”

“ There is something thrilling about the idea which appeals to the imagination—the receiving of mysterious messages from afar, through the air, and sending back from your little instrument the far-flying answers. ”

“ His imagination, that marvelous power of visualizing the absent or non-existent, is perverted by being turned inward and forced to rest content with its hollow fabrication, instead of being directed outward upon a plastic world waiting its formative touch. ”

“ But imagination can transcend the work of fancy, and compare an image drawn from the external world with some spiritual truth born in the mind itself, or infuse a series of images with such a spiritual truth, molding them as needed for its more vivid expression.
The imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one.... ”

“ The imagination is the reader of these forms. The poet accounts all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of language, uses them representatively, too well pleased with their ulterior to value much their primary meaning. Every new object so seen gives a shock of agreeable surprise. The impressions on the imagination make the great days of life: the book, the landscape, or the personality which did not stay on the surface of the eye or ear, but penetrated to the inward sense, agitates us, and is not forgotten. ”

“ Assuredly, so far as you feel more at beholding the snowy mountain than any other object of the same sweet silvery grey, these are the kind of images which cause you to do so; and observe, these are nothing more than a greater apprehension of the facts of the thing. We call the power 'Imagination,' because it imagines or conceives; but it is only noble imagination, if it imagines or conceives the truth. And according to the degree of knowledge possessed, and of sensibility to the pathetic or impressive character of the things known, will be the degree of this imaginative delight. ”

“ But such is not the case, for the imagination has a sphere of action very different from that of the intelligence or the will. It is an interior mirror which reflects back upon the soul images of things beheld by the senses and conceived by the intelligence, without regard to time or place. ”

“ I have always been curious about the psychology of my own vision as desirous of imparting it, and I wish in this book to relate the efforts of an artist and poet to discover what truth lay in his own imaginations. I have brooded longer over the nature of imagination than I have lingered over the canvas where I tried to rebuild my vision. ”

“ We have an imagination, before which, since it should not seize upon the very first conceptions that chance to present themselves, we ought to place the fittest and most beautiful images, and thus accustom and practise the mind to recognize and love the beautiful everywhere, and in nature itself, under its determined, true, and also in its finer, features. ”

“ Flights of imagination, beautiful imagery, delicacy of sentiment, and elegance of language, were all to be sacrificed to far-fetched conceits, remote allusions, metaphysical subtleties, and quaint combinations of the most incongruous ideas. ”

“ Imagination shows us a scheme of emotion attending the scheme of events and presents it in its general connection with life, in simple, powerful, and complete expression, on the lines of inevitable law in its sphere. ”

“ In its subtlest operations, further, Imagination penetrates below the surface and comprehends and brings to light the deeper forces and facts—the real controlling instincts of characters, the real motives for actions, and the relations of material things to those of the spiritual world and of Man to Nature and God. ”

“ The imagination disposes of everything; it makes beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in the world. ”

“ The imagination, without leave, starts to and fro, and carries us away, hither and thither, whether we will or no: and all this, from the merely natural motion of the spirits, or vibration of the nerves. ”

“ The world of my imagination is my world as opposed to the world of my understanding, which is the world of all my fellow creatures. On the other hand, as regards the will, we might repeat exactly, word for word, what we have just said of the imagination. ”

“ For youth and love are shining words in the vocabulary of the Imagination—words which contain the deepest of present and predict the sweetest of future happiness. So deeply interwoven is the real significance of these words with the Imagination that, separated from it, they lose all their magical glow and beauty. ”

“ But what is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason. ”

“ All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words. ”

“ Wonderful indeed is the scientific imagination that thus accounts for, classifies, and labels the imagination of the poets, which otherwise we might think a thing defying classification, an inspiration, a creative genius taking nothing from a dim suggestion of the cold clouds and sea, but weaving its tales from the suggestion of human lives and human passions. ”

“ A powerful imagination must fuse the [226] harsh elements of composition until all foreign substances have disappeared, and every coarse, shapeless word has been absorbed by the heat, and then the language will brighten into that clear and unclouded style through which the most delicate conceptions of the mind and the faintest emotions of the heart are visible. ”

“ That which we call the beautiful, wakens into life through the association of ideas, of memories, of experiences, of suggestions of pleasure past and the perception that the prophecies of the ideal have been and will be fulfilled.
Art cultivates and kindles the imagination, and quickens the conscience. It is by imagination that we put ourselves in the place of another. ”

“ For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is—art. ”

“ The imagination will be so allowed to invest events and experiences with either a halo of glory or a cloud of prejudice that the narrator will constantly tell, not what he clearly sees written in the book of his remembrance, but what he beholds painted upon the canvas of his own imagination. ”

“ Therefore the imagination is required in order to complete, arrange, give the finishing touches to, retain, and repeat at pleasure all those significant pictures of life, according as the aims of a profoundly penetrating knowledge and of the significant work whereby they are to be communicated may demand. Upon this rests the high value of imagination, which is an indispensable tool of genius. ”

“ But the truth is, that imagination tells both ways—as much against the miraculous as for it. The imagination, that faculty by which we give life and body and reality to our intellectual conceptions, takes its character from the intellectual conceptions with which it is habitually associated. ”

“ The imagination, swayed by pictures of sensuous life, revels in the fantastic imagery it attributes to this unknown and dimly conceived state of existence, more often picturing what is false than what is true. ”

“ for you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape. ”

“ At this period the imagination is the master-faculty and the highest form of intellectual development. It works in two directions, one principal—it creates plays, invents romances, and extends language ”

“ The gift of being strongly affected by objects and reproducing their absent or vanished images, and the power of modifying these images so as to compose of them new ones,—do they fully constitute what men call imagination? No, or at least, if these are indeed the proper elements of imagination, there must be something else added, to wit, the sentiment of the beautiful in all its degrees. ”

“ The basis for attracting the best of all the world can give to you is to first surround, own, and live in these things in mind, or what is falsely called imagination. All so-called imaginings are realities and forces of unseen element. ”

“ But I believe such creatures have no imagination. With imagination you have the glamour of the past and all the wonderful things that have happened in a place, as well as the mere beauty of the present. ”

“ But which, amongst the many qualities of perception, is the power of imagination to behold, in the image? Here we arrive at the external substance of the rule: the power of imagination is to be guided by the prototype of external perception. ”

“ It begins in sustained reflection and in the thought which accumulates images and sifts them, garners and winnows them out, and compels life to keep control over imagination, and imagination to expand and enlarge life. ”