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Imagination quotes

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“Even sleepers and dreamers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.” Heraclitus, “On Nature” - c. 535 – c. 475 BCE

“To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.” Anatole France, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard” - 1881

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.” Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice” - 28 January 1813

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.” Carl Sagan, “Cosmos” - 1980

“I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.” David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” - 1748

“The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.” Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” - 1899

“I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.” Henry James, “The Portrait of a Lady” - 1881

“You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.” Agatha Christie, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” - 1920

“My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.” John Steinbeck, “East of Eden” - 1952

“Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.” Andy Warhol, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” - 1975

“The desire for imaginary benefits often involves the loss of present blessings.” Aesop, “Aesop's Fables”

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” J. K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” - 2007

“a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” Oscar Wilde, “Intentions” - 1891

“you can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” - 1889

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact” William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night's Dream” - 1601

“You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity.” Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” - 1890

“if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.” John Green, “Paper Towns” - 2008

“People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.” Neil Gaiman, “American Gods” - 2001

“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.” Margaret Atwood, “The Blind Assassin” - 2000

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” Stephen King, “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” - 2000

“Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will” John Green, “Paper Towns” - 2008

“The amount of civilization is measured by the quantity of imagination.” Victor Hugo, “Les Misérables” - 1862

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.” G. K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy” - 1908

“The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.” William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night's Dream” - 1601

“For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible. ” Lewis Carroll, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” - 1865

“And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.” Lewis Carroll, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” - 1865

“Once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.” Lewis Carroll, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” - 1865

“When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” Lewis Carroll, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” - 1865

“There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.” Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet” - 1887

“The imagination has the command over all its ideas, and can join and mix and vary them, in all the ways possible.” David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” - 1748

“It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.” Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” - 1899

“I never did anything in life to any one's imagination.” Henry James, “The Portrait of a Lady” - 1881

“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out of the window.” Henry James, “The Portrait of a Lady” - 1881

“Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!” Edith Wharton, “The Age of Innocence” - 1920

“On this account, nothing is more dangerous than solitude: there our imagination, always disposed to rise, taking a new flight on the wings of fancy, pictures to us a chain of beings of whom we seem the most inferior. All things appear greater...” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorrows of Young Werther” - 1774

“Thus the principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.” Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America” - 1840

“Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve...” Barack Obama, “Inaugural Address” - 20 January 2009

“Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?” Leonardo da Vinci, “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci” - 1478 – 1519

“I neither believe nor disbelieve in anything. That which can be imagined is as much an approximation to truth as that which can be proved by mathematics.” Charlie Chaplin, “My Autobiography” - 1964

“Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.” Blaise Pascal, “Pensées” - 1670

“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.” Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” - 1984

“I also became a poet and for one year lived in a paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.” Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein” - 1818

“action . . . is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.” Oscar Wilde, “Intentions” - 1891

“That didn't happen, of course. Things never happened like I imagined them.” John Green, “Looking for Alaska” - 2005

“You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don’t care if you are imaginary.” Neil Gaiman, “The Graveyard Book” - 2008

“You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “This Side of Paradise” - 1920

“the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much...” Stephen King, “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” - 2000

“For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby” - 1925

“They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.” Margaret Atwood, “Oryx and Crake” - 2003

“Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form...” Adam Smith, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” - 1759

Related topics

reality belief dreams love courage mind knowledge friendship reading heart writing poetry responsibility attraction strength women reason truth past future

Related authors

Oscar Wilde (4)
Lewis Carroll (4)
John Green (4)
Henry James (3)
William Shakespeare (2)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2)
David Hume (2)
Joseph Conrad (2)
Louisa May Alcott (2)
Haruki Murakami (2)
Stephen King (2)
Neil Gaiman (2)
Margaret Atwood (2)
Milan Kundera (2)
Jane Austen (1)
Mark Twain (1)
J. K. Rowling (1)
G. K. Chesterton (1)
Heraclitus (1)
Arthur Conan Doyle (1)

Related sources

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (4)
The Portrait of a Lady (3)
Paper Towns (3)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (2)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (2)
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (2)
Heart of Darkness (2)
Little Women (2)
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2)
Intentions (2)
Pride and Prejudice (1)
This Side of Paradise (1)
On Nature (1)
A Study in Scarlet (1)
Les Misérables (1)
The Age of Innocence (1)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (1)
The Education of Henry Adams (1)
Democracy in America (1)