Imagination

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

- Albert Einstein

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

- Antoine de Saint Exupery

I want meadows red in tone and trees painted in blue. Nature has no imagination.

- Charlse Baudelaire

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.

- Christopher Isherwood

To see far is one thing, going there is another.

- Constantin Brancusi

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

- Edward Abbey

According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum". I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces.

- Edward Abbey

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

- Eleanor Roosevelt

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

- Francisco Goya

Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on the open sea of thought.

- Francois Gautier

Boredom excites imagination

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Most idealistic people are skint. I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money.

- George Weiss

Although all knowledge begins with experience, it does not necessarily all spring from experience.

- Immanuel Kant

... imagination acts upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid.

- James Frazer

Man consists of body, mind and imagination. His body is faulty, his mind untrustworthy, but his imagination has made him remarkable.

- John Masefield

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

- Joseph Conrad

The man with imagination and no culture has wings without feet

- Joseph Joubert

Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.

- Louis Aragon

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. ..And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do no bring forth in the agitation.

- Michel de Montaigne, (1533 - 1592)

Imagination rules the world.

- Napoleon Bonaparte

If one is not half mad how can one give birth to a dancing star?

- Nietzsche

If one is not half mad how can one give birth to a dancing star?

- Nietzsche

The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine.

- Paul Auster

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious

- Paul ValÈry

Consolation from imaginary things is not an imaginary consolation

- Roger Scruton

I don't want realistic!† I want magic!

- Tenessee Williams, "A Street Car Named Desire" ( ? )

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

- Thomas Edison

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

- Thomas Edison

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

- Tom Stoppard

My happiness did indeed arise from the same secret as the happiness in dreams; it arose from the freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange outward and inward easily...as we conquered the war-shattered world by our faith and transformed it into paradise, we creatively brought the past, the future and the fictitious into the present moment. The present moment! Now!

- Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Koolaid Acid Test" ( ? )

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

- Ursula K. Le Guin

Imagination is intelligence with an erection.

- Victor Hugo

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

- Wallace Stevens

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

- William Blake

Art degraded, Imagination denied.

- William Blake

I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.

- William Faulkner, "Selected Letters of William Faulkner" ( ? )

Related Quotes

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

- Tom Stoppard, "Artist Descending a Staircase" ( ? ), In Art/Criticism

random quote