creativity

The mind, without imagination,
would be as useless as an
observatory without a telescope.

Fred van Amburgh
   
The highest and best work of imagination is the marvelous
transformation that it works in character.  Imagine that you are
one with the principal of good, and you will become truly good.

Charles Fillmore

      

Imagination is the first step in creation whether in words or trifles.
The mental pattern must always precede the material form.

William W. Atkinson
  
Imagination has brought humankind through the dark ages to its present
state of civilization.  Imagination led Columbus to discover America.
Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.  Imagination has given us
the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile,
for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.
So I believe that dreams--daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide
open and your brain machinery whizzing--are likely to lead to the
betterment of the world.  The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to invent, and therefore to foster, civilization.

L. Frank Baum
   

Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining
things together in such a way that they throw new light on
each other and on everything around them.  The imagination
is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships,
for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new.

Thomas Merton

   
True imagination is not fanciful daydreaming; it is fire from heaven.

Ernest Holmes

The world of reality has its limits;
the world of imagination is boundless.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  
   
  

Once you know with abundant certainty that nothing can trouble you
but your own imagination, you come to disregard your desires
and fears, concepts and ideas, and live by truth alone.

Nisargadatta
   

Imagination is our ability
to see inwardly and picture
there that which has not
yet appeared outwardly.
Imagination is God's gift
to us.

Donald Curtis
   
   
   
The world is but a canvas
to our imaginations.

Henry David Thoreau

   
Imagination is a flame that ignites the creative spirit.  Imagination lights up your mind by stoking mental fires.  It can be stimulated from the outside through the senses, or from the inside through the driving power of curiosity and discontent.

Imagination stimulates your thinking power by giving your mind abundant data with which to work.  It opens the gate to dreams and fantasies so that you may become receptive, as a little child, in exploring the Kingdom of Ideas.

Imagination guides you in your contacts with individuals and crowds, so you can discover new concepts and approaches.

Imagination inspires you to look at everything with fresh eyes, as though you had just come forth from a dark tunnel into the light of day.  Imagination becomes for you a magic lamp with which to search the darkness of the unknown, that you may discover new goals or chart more productive paths to old goals.

Imagination helps you to recognize the reality of facts, but then to go beyond them, to penetrate beneath them, to rise above them in your search for creative answers to problems.  Imagination "stirs up the gift of God in thee."  Through your imagination you touch and express the inspiration of the Infinite.  Imagination, in the words of Shakespeare, "gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name."  You reach into the heavens to grasp an idea, then you bring it down to earth and make it work.

Wilferd A. Peterson
   

   
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality;
they are also dress rehearsals, plans.
All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
  

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground--
not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.

Robertson Davies
   

Imagination is the true magic carpet.

Norman Vincent Peale

Imagination offers people consolation
for what they cannot be, and
humor for what they actually are.

Albert Camus

Imagination is the highest kite that one can fly.

Lauren Bacall

I believe in the imagination.
What I cannot see is infinitely more
important than what I can see.

Duane Michals
   

   
The opportunities of people are limited only by their imagination.
But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand
fiddlers to one composer.

Charles F. Kettering
  
  

You can't depend on your judgment
when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain
   
All prosperity begins in the mind and is dependent only upon the full use of our creative imagination.

Ruth Ross
   

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Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein
   

The person who has no imagination has no wings.

Muhammad Ali
   
   

There are no mistakes and it's never boring on the edge
of imagination, which is only pure spirit having a bit of fun.

Hugh Romney
   

We are what we imagine.  Our very existence consists in our
imagination of ourselves.  The greatest tragedy that can
befall us is to go unimagined.

N. Scott Momaday
    

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The future is simply infinite possibility waiting to happen.  What it
waits on is human imagination to crystallize its possibility.

Leland Kaiser
   

Imagination begins when it' s raining too hard to go out and play
and you become really absorbed in something you would never
have thought of doing had the sun come out as usual.  In which
case, thank God for the rain.

Joan Chittister
   

   

The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity,
and the principal source of human improvement.  Destroy this faculty,
and the condition of people will become as stationary as that of brutes.

Dugald Stewart
   
The facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.

Parker J. Palmer
The Courage to Teach
   

Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to
birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

Carl Jung