Top 100 Imagination Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best imagination quotes ever written, picked out of the full imagination archive on QuoteForever. You will find C. S. Lewis, David Hume, Dean Koontz and Edgar Allan Poe among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

Bad teaching is teaching which presents an endless procession of meaningless signs, words and rules, and fails to arouse the imagination.

Imagine all the people living life in peace. - John Lennon 2

Imagine all the people living life in peace.

3

My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.

4

The story of Jesus Christ appearing after he was dead is the story of an apparition, such as timid imaginations can always create in vision, and credulity believe. Stories of this kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar.

5

Music has the capacity to touch the innermost reaches of the soul and music gives flight to the imagination.

6

A library is a home filled with our stories. On every shelf, we see ourselves, experience our collective conscious, describe our dreams and our great longing for times that have passed, the sterling moment of the present and the glorious future known only in our imaginations.

7

It's a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.

8

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

9

There is something more important than logic: imagination

10

The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

11

When you're playing Shakespeare, it forces you to think and feel and speak all at the same time, which really is what acting is. It expands your imagination and expands your size of thinking.

12

On one hand, I kind of feel like I have unlimited options right now, and obviously that's not technically true, but when you're at this place where you're just kind of dreaming up stuff, your imagination is your limit. That's where I'm at, which is great, but ultimately I think you have to make these decisions to close off some options to yourself. I think things only get done when you say, "This is the one thing I'm doing," and you kind of kill the other ones in the meantime. So I haven't done that yet, I've got to figure that out.

13

Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

14

My hope is that this life is not all there is. This life is like preparation for what is coming next, and what is coming next is something so glorious that the Bible says minds can't conceive it, eye has never seen, your imagination could never even enter into all that God is preparing for those who love him.

15

Because the world of this film begins and ends in the imagination of Tim Burton, you're not seeing a movie that's been shot on locations that you've seen a million times. Because this world has no rules, you're seeing so many different and separate brushstrokes and colors and characterizations somehow getting combined through Tim.

16

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

17

If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination. He is compelled to participate in the creative act, which I consider very important.

18

Common integration is only the memory of differentiation... The different artifices by which integration is effected, are changes, not from the known to the unknown, but from forms in which memory does not serve us to those in which it does.

19

Be drawn to the visual arts for it can expand your imagination.

20

The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians.

21

Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination.

22

Imagination is the mightiest despot.

23

A mission could be defined as an image of a desired state that you want to get to. Once fully seen, it will inspire you to act, fuel your imagination and determine your behavior.

24

Fantasy leaves imaginations larger than it finds them.

25

I wanted to write something visual that I could read to the children. This was when I created the idea of Redwall Abbey in my imagination. As I wrote, the idea grew, and the manuscript along with it.

26

That was the appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.

27

Art requires imagination. It requires Creativity. Creativity requires experience and experience comes from your life. And your life is expressed in your art.

28

Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.

29

To write a song you must have an imagination, to have an imagination you must be free.

30

Ray Bradbury is one who is contributing to the understanding of the imagination and the curiosity of the human race.

31

As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

32

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

33

If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination.

34

The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.

35

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead.

36

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.

37

Of course the thoughts and awareness are there, but it's all incomplete and often fanciful - kids know there's something to know, and they fill in a bunch of the blanks with their imaginations if their parents haven't had the conversations and/or established themselves as sources of information. It's rare that the kids know nothing at all, and the somethings they do know are often only partially right or flat-out wrong.

38

o matter how much research you do, or invention you do, whether it's a character from a novel, a completely invented character or someone who actually existed, it's a work of faction. By the very fact you only have an hour and a half or two hours to tell a story, you're telescoping events and it is, in the end, a work of imagination.

39

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

40

The moon likes secrets," Meran said. "And secret things. She lets mysteries bleed into her shadows and leaves us to ask whether they originated from otherworlds, or from our own imaginations.

41

My imagination would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention

42

Women are not as sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature, being less poetical, and having less imagination; they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make fewer failures in business.

43

When we hate a person, with an intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or sympathize -- any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create some sort of sympathy.

44

It is with some violation of the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage.

45

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

46

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

47

No one can mock your meagre achievements or inability to accomplish the simplest of tasks, if they remain figments of your imagination. You can revel, again and again, in the glory of a fairy tale doomed never to appear in reality.

48

I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.

49

But anyone with the time and the inclination can acquire technical proficiency. To achieve greatness, though, that requires artistry. That requires imagination and thoughtfulness.

50

Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

51

The eloquence of a scientist is clarity; scientific truth is always more luminous when its beauty is unadorned than when it is tricked out in the embellishments with which our imagination would seek to clothe it.

52

In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else Ive ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.

53

I have visualised my imagination so clearly and so consistently that it has manifested itself into my reality.

54

There's no such thing as im-POSSIBLE, Hiccup, only im-PROBABLE. The only thing that limits us are the limits to our imagination

55

Come, enter into my imagination and see me as I truly am.

56

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

57

Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

58

Chess is imagination.

59

In the early 21st century, it is easy to condemn the Bond books for being racist and imperialist, sexist and misogynist, elitist and sadistic. But this is merely another way of saying that we cannot understand the Bond books without reference to the personality, the outlook and the 'Tory imagination' of the man who wrote them, and to the time in which he wrote them; and that we cannot understand the 1950s and 1960s without some reference to them, and to him.

60

Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.

61

I've always felt that anyone who wants to talk about my private life is only demonstrating the paucity of his/her imagination when there are so many more important and exciting things to discuss.

62

Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your music. There goes your culture. There goes everything new that would pop out. And in a way, this is what’s happened to our society. We’re a society that has lost any ability to incorporate the interesting, creative and eccentric people.

63

In the sphere of natural investigation, as in poetry and painting, the delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed.

64

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

65

Nothing more powerfully excites any affection than to conceal some part of its object, by throwing it into a kind of shade, whichat the same time that it shows enough to prepossess us in favour of the object, leaves still some work for the imagination.

66

A fly rod extends a fly fisher's being as surely as do imagination, empathy or prayer.

67

I had a very happy childhood, but I wasn't that happy a child. I liked being alone and creating characters and voices. I think that's when your creativity is developed, when you're young. I liked the world of the imagination because it was an easy place to go to.

68

The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.

69

I admit to having an imagination feverish enough to melt good judgment.

70

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness

71

You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.

72

The best use of imagination is creativity. The worst use of imagination is anxiety.

73

One of the wonderful aspects of the human imagination is its power to break through the barriers of time and space. It can see things not as they are but as the can be.

74

In every race there is a crucial moment when the body wants to quit. Then it needs imagination and mental tenacuty to survive the crisis. Otherwise the penalty is defeat.

75

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

76

I think your imagination is your reality

77

The only war is the war against the imagination.

78

What you contemplate, you touch. What you enter into in imagination, you make yourself one with.

79

When I started the Imagination Library in my hometown, I never dreamed that one day we would be helping Scottish kids.

80

Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit

81

Dance form is logical, but it is all in the realm of feeling, sensitivity and imagination.

82

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.

83

The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.

84

Space and time are figments of you're imagination, unless the guy you're flying next to won't shut up.

85

It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.

86

Dr. Einstein was not successful in school, but he found something in the air from his own imagination and his own brain power, and look what he did.

87

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime

88

In the one instance, the dreamerloses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestionsuntilhe finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings,... forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance.

89

I think that different actors go about their preparation differently, but when it comes to acting, I use my imagination.

90

Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

91

There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.

92

One of the great elements of the supernatural is having that mystery and letting people's imaginations run wild with it.

93

The bird Imagination, That flies so far, that dies so soon; Her wings are colored like the sun, Her breast is colored like the moon.

94

The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

95

The only thing that limits us is our imagination.

96

Prejudices subsist in people's imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience.

97

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.

98

You are a creator. You create with your every thought...anything you can imagine is yours to be, do or have.

99

You can offer your vibration on purpose. That's what visualization is. That's what imagination is: projecting thought energy on purpose.

100

Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious.

More Imagination quotes

This is the short list. The full imagination quotes collection holds every quote on the subject in the archive, and the picture quotes are ready to share as images.

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