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Imagination Quotes

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.
– Terry Brooks
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We especially need imagination in science.
– Maria Mitchell
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We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.
– Jessica Hagedorn
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We can live with lots of things, but we can't live without imagination, we can't live without hope.
– Ariel Dorfman
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We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.
– Thomas Merton
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We are more often frightened than hurt and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit.
– Doris Day
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Usually I say I have no imagination.
– Jose Padilha
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Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.
– Mark Haddon
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Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.
– Arthur Keith
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Ultimately, so much Dr. Seuss is about empowerment. He invites us to disappear into our imagination and then blows the doors off what that can mean.
– Gary Ross
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Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.
– Marquis de Sade
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True intelligence requires fabulous imagination.
– Ian Mcewan
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Toy Soldiers was my introduction to film. I certainly didn't think I was doing art by any stretch of the imagination.
– Tim Robbins
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Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
– Cyril Connolly
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Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.
– Karen Armstrong
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To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.
– John Burroughs
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To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.
– Isaac D'Israeli
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To them though, not to us, we were just a catalyst for their imagination.
– Donald Sutherland
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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
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To put yourself in another's place requires real imagination, but by doing so each Girl Scout will be able to love among others happily.
– Juliette Gordon Low
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To put up a show is to face life's injustices with one of the few weapons available to a desperate and brave people, their imagination.
– Luigi Barzini
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To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.
– Frank Auerbach
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To my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination.
– Marcus Fabius Quintilian
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To me, it's far more efficient to mobilize the imagination. It's far more efficient to hear a creaking step, for example, than to see the face of a monster, which usually looks ridiculous, and where you know that the blood is ketchup.
– Michael Haneke
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Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin's 'Courant,' it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America's last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive.
– Eric Alterman
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Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.
– Edgar Allan Poe
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Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.
– Vincent van Gogh
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This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts.
– Adam Smith
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They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director's imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.
– Toby Jones
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They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people.
– Margaret Mahy
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There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.
– Idris Elba
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There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, people who understand the joy of the imagination.
– Zac Posen
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There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination.
– Eddie Marsan
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There's no environment. Use your imagination. There's no fourth wall, whether it's the first time you've told this story about her life, or the sixth time.
– Jill Clayburgh
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There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.
– Geraldine Brooks
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There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
– Lionel Trilling
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There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.
– William Godwin
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There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.
– Leigh Hunt
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There are no shortcuts in life - only those we imagine.
– Frank Leahy
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There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
– Edith Wharton
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Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.
– Jack Vance
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Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect.
– Jack Prelutsky
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The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.
– Thomas Kinkade
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The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.
– Elizabeth Drew
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The woman who appeals to a man's vanity may stimulate him, the woman who appeals to his heart may attract him, but it is the woman who appeals to his imagination who gets him.
– Helen Rowland
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The way that a handful of corporations in Los Angeles dictate how our stories are told creates a real poverty of imagination and it's a big problem.
– Alex Cox
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The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
– Samuel Johnson
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The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.
– Geraldine Brooks
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The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.
– Dennis Potter
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The source and center of all man's creative power... is his power of making images, or the power of imagination.
– Robert Collier
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The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
– Thomas Huxley
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The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.
– Robert Fitzgerald
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The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.
– Steven Spielberg
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The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination.
– Edmund Wilson
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The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
– Georg C. Lichtenberg
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The peculiar fascination which the South held over my imagination and my limited capital decided me in favor of Atlanta University so about the last of September I bade farewell to the friends and scenes of my boyhood and boarded a train for the South.
– James Weldon Johnson
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The openness of rural Nebraska certainly influenced me. That openness, in a way, fosters the imagination. But growing up, Lincoln wasn't a small town. It was a college town. It had record stores and was a liberal place.
– Matthew Sweet
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The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.
– Carol Ann Duffy
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The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.
– Thomas Jefferson
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The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
– Henry George
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The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
– William Shakespeare
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The loss of liberty which must attend being a wife was of all things the most horrible to my imagination.
– Sarah Fielding
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The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.
– Aesop
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The initial motivation of the experiment which led to this discovery was a subconscious feeling for the inexhaustible wealth of nature, a wealth that goes far beyond the imagination of man.
– Bruno Rossi
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The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
– Marquis de Sade
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
– Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from.
– Bryan Cranston
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The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.
– Terence McKenna
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The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them.
– John Desmond Bernal
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The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.
– Edmund Wilson
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The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
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The Grateful Dead, they're my best friends. Their message of hope, peace, love, teamwork, creativity, imagination, celebration, the dance, the vision, the purpose, the passion all of the things I believe in makes me the luckiest Deadhead in the world.
– Bill Walton
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The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.
– Van Morrison
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The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.
– Gilbert Murray
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The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
– Henry James
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The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.
– Richard Powers
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
– George Santayana
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The costume that I wear on the show is a little snug and doesn't leave a whole lot to the imagination. I don't have a problem with it because of the way this character's been written.
– Jeri Ryan
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The conscious process is reflected in the imagination the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.
– William Irwin Thompson
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The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.
– Ai Weiwei
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The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
– Richard Wright
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That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
– George Berkeley
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Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.
– Rob Bell
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Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!
– Robert Creeley
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Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.
– Bruce Catton
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Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.
– Shirley Hazzard
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Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.
– Lily Tomlin
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Sometimes a technology is so awe-inspiring that the imagination runs away with it - often far, far away from reality. Robots are like that. A lot of big and ultimately unfulfilled promises were made in robotics early on, based on preliminary successes.
– Daniel H. Wilson
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Sometimes a character is really based on research that you do. Other times it's just based on your imagination or perhaps your conversation with the director. Or sometimes all of the above. It depends on the movie and character.
– Joaquin Phoenix
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Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.
– Paul Wolfowitz
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Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.
– David E. Kelley
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Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
– James Russell Lowell
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So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.
– Diana Krall
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She has no imagination and that means no compassion.
– Michael Foot
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Shakespeare fascinated me. He hardly ever left the country. His imagination was worldwide though reading.
– Michael Tippett
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Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.
– James Welch
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Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers.
– Les Baxter
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Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.
– Yann Martel
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