Quotes, quotations and passages on imagination

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 The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

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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

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the
truth of imagination--what the imagination seizes as beauty
must be truth--whether it existed before or not.

John Keats
"letter to Benjamin Bailey"

Whatever we choose to imagine can be as private as we want it to
be. Nobody knows what you're thinking or feeling unless you share it.

Fred Rogers
The World According to Mr. Rogers

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

I believe imagination is our premium resource. We carry
within us the lost diversity this planet needs. Engaging
our individual expression, using imagination to inform,
expand, and guide us, we can begin to return to Eden.

Suzanne Beth Stinnett
Little Shifts

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

The person who has no imagination has no wings.

Muhammad Ali

As the imagination is set to look into the invisible and immaterial,
it seems to attract something of their vitality; and though it can
give nothing to the body to redeem it from years, it can give to
the soul that freshness of youth in old age which is
even more beautiful than youth in the young.

Henry Ward Beecher
Life Thoughts

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire,
you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

George Bernard Shaw

Imagination was given to us to compensate us for what we are not;
a sense of humor to console us for what we are.

Francis Bacon

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

The only faculty by which we can bring the invisible near, is the
imagination. Beyond that which the eye sees, beyond that which
the ear hears, is a great region in which life is freer and more
transcendently glorious than this. The imagination in us
finds its field in trying to grasp that great fact.

Reuen Thomas
Thoughts for the Thoughtful

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

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any
philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and
intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

Charles Baudelaire
New Notes on E. Poe

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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

Our griefs, as well as our joys, owe their strongest colors to our imaginations.
There is nothing so grievous to be borne that pondering upon it will not make
it heavier; and there is no pleasure so vivid that the animation of fancy cannot liven it.

Jane Porter

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief,
it is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

Somerset Maugham

Humans consist of body, mind and imagination. Our bodies are faulty,
our minds untrustworthy, but our imagination has made us remarkable.

John Masefield

The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has
no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though
unseen by the outward eye--not creation, but insight.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Table-Talk

The wonder of imagination is this: It has the power to light its own fire.

John L. Mason
You're Born an Original

Our imagination is the most important faculty we possess. It can be
our greatest resource or our most formidable adversary. It is through
our imagination that we discern possibilities and options. Yet
imagination is no mere blank slate on which we simply inscribe our
will. Rather, imagination is the deepest voice of the soul and can be
heard clearly only through cultivation and careful attention. A
relationship with our imagination is a relationship with our deepest self.

Pat B. Allen
Art Is a Way of Knowing

We do not need magic to change the world. We carry all the power we
need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling

The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper
and soars higher than Nature goes.

Henry David Thoreau
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau

The training and education of the majority of people do not half
emphasize the possibilities of enjoyment through the imagination.
The trouble is that most of us put too much emphasis upon the
limitations of the senses. The imagination was given us to lift us
out of all surrounding things and to make us practically omnipresent.
In the twinkling of an eye we can follow Arcturus flying through
space at the rate of twenty thousand miles a minute; although we
may be amid the snows of the North, in an instant we can be
among the palms and orange groves of the tropics.

Orison Swett Marden
The Joys of Living (1913)