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Imagination Quotes

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.
– Bryant H. McGill
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It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.
– H. L. Mencken
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The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
– James A. Michener
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Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
– Henry Miller
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A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.
– William Morris
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Woman is the sun, an extraordinary creature, one that makes the imagination gallop. Woman is also the element of conflict. With whom do you argue? With a woman, of course. Not with a friend, because he accepted all your defects the moment he found you. Besides, woman is mother-have we forgotten?
– Marcello Mastroianni
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I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it's a way to get information and find out what's going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination.
– Breckin Meyer
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I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.
– Duane Michals
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Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
– Vladimir Nabokov
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To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.
– George Jean Nathan
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There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
– Anais Nin
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You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.
– Azar Nafisi
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If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
– George Orwell
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A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.
– Russell Page
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Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
– Blaise Pascal
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It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
– Cesare Pavese
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Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.
– Norman Vincent Peale
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I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
– Pablo Picasso
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Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.
– Luigi Pirandello
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A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination.
– Arthur W. Pinero
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I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.
– Man Ray
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The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment.
– Anthony Robbins
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One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines.
– Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
– Philip Roth
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The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
– Jean Jacques Rousseau
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What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
– Salman Rushdie
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The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized.
– Mary Caroline Richards
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The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence.
– Edward Vernon Rickenbacker
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A clever, imagination, humorous request can open closed doors and closed minds.
– Percy Ross
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It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
– Henry David Thoreau
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This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
– Henry David Thoreau
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Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.
– Arnold J. Toynbee
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America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
– Harry S. Truman
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You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
– Mark Twain
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What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.
– Kerry Thornley
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The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
– William Trevor
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Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
– Vincent van Gogh
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Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
– Leonardo da Vinci
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One supreme fact which I have discovered is that it is not willpower, but fantasy-imagination that creates. Imagination is the creative force. Imagination creates reality.
– Richard Wagner
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You have all the reason in the world to achieve your grandest dreams. Imagination plus innovation equals realization.
– Denis Waitley
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Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
– Simone Weil
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I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.
– H. G. Wells
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Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
– Jessamyn West
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The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
– Jessamyn West
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Some stories are true that never happened.
– Elie Wiesel
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The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
– Oscar Wilde
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Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
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The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
– Derek Walcott
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Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment.
– William Warburton
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Television contracts the imagination and radio expands it.
– Terry Wogan
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People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
– William Butler Yeats
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I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel.
– Peter Nivio Zarlenga
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A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
– Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
– Sir Francis Bacon
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There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.
– Sean O'Faolain
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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
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He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.
– Richard Brinsley Sheridan
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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
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You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies we do.
– Dougray Scott
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You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.
– Henri Bergson
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You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination.
– Maimonides
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You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.
– Peter Shaffer
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You know, working as an actor, I'm always working within my own imagination.
– Charles Keating
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You have to just go with your imagination, where your instinct takes you.
– Peter Mullan
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You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.
– Rita Dove
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You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.
– Larry McMurtry
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You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
– Milan Kundera
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You can have 10 bucks to 10 million bucks and if you got a crew, imagination and a lot of people willing to turn in some work next to nothing, you going to have a feature. But you can't get beyond how expensive marketing the movie is, it's so crushing.
– Kevin Smith
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You are indebted to you imagination for three-fourths of your importance.
– David Garrick
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Yes, I was correctly quoted in saying I introduced sex into films in the 20's, but it was sex in good taste and left a great deal to one's imagination.
– Pola Negri
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Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
– Ishmael Reed
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Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
– Jack Prelutsky
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Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
– Janet Frame
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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
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Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.
– Rita Dove
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With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?
– Iain Sinclair
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With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour.
– Theodore Gericault
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Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.
– Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot.
– Frank Rich
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Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.
– Stephen King
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When you're young you have no worries, no drama, only your imagination. It's the best!
– Devon Werkheiser
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When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.
– Susan Sarandon
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When you are young your imagination is so clear.
– Nina Blackwood
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When we were filming 'The Darkest Hour,' we didn't even know what the aliens were going to look like, we didn't even have a graphic reference. So it was definitely a big challenge to sell those kind of extreme moments when you're just generating them from your own imagination.
– Olivia Thirlby
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When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.
– Ahmet Zappa
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When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.
– Tim Berners-Lee
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When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.
– Andrea Mitchell
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When I was on my own in a hotel room in Romania, I had the imagination to keep myself occupied.
– Rhona Mitra
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What's in front of you is a whole world of experiences beyond your imagination. Put yourself, and your growth and development, first.
– Phylicia Rashad
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
– Doris Lessing
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What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
– Wynton Marsalis
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What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.
– Jeffrey Katzenberg
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What does it mean to be Catholic and not a Catholic? I feel adrift, homeless. My Catholic imagination allows me to see the soul as a lit breath, seeking the divine. It persists.
– Julianna Baggott
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Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
– Samuel Johnson
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Well, the fact is that one imagination is critically important, and if you have had your imagination stimulated by what is basically a variety of subjects, you are much more amenable to accepting, to understanding and interacting with the realities of the world.
– Ashley Judd
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Well, I'm not a method actress by any stretch of the imagination so the best thing that I can do is be as real as possible and find whatever commonality in that character that I can see myself.
– Rashida Jones
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Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination.
– Terry Brooks
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We're living in a time when the world has suddenly discovered India because it's run out of raw material for its imagination. The raw materials for imagination are inexhaustible here.
– Deepak Chopra
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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
– Wallace Stevens
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We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
– Anne Sullivan Macy
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