The sound and proper exercise of the imagination may be made to contribute to the cultivation of all that is virtuous and estimable in the human character.
- John Abercrombie
The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.
- Aesop
Imagination is the mightiest despot.
- Berthold Auerbach
Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.
- Lauren Bacall
Imagination I understand to be the representation of an individual thought. Imagination is of three kinds: joined with belief of that which is to come; joined with memory of that which is past; and of things present.
- Francis Bacon
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
- Francis Bacon
Imagination is the air of mind.
- Philip James Bailey, Festus
(sc. Another and a Better World)
The imagination is the secret and harrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
- Henry Ward Beecher
The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
- Henry Ward Beecher
Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match.
- Ingrid Bengis
A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
- Bishop George Berkeley
The imagination acquires by custom a certain involuntary, unconscious power of observation and comparison, correcting its own mistakes, and arriving at precision of judgment, just as the outward eye is disciplined to compare, adjust, estimate, measure, the objects reflected on the back of its retina. The imagination is but the faculty of glassing images; and it is with exceeding difficulty, and by the imperative will of the reasoning faculty resolved to mislead it, that it glasses images which have no prototype in truth and nature.
- Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Fancy can save or kill; it hath clos'd up
Wounds when the balsam could not, and without
The aid of salves:--to think hath been a cure.
For witchcraft then, that's all done by the force
Of mere imagination.
- William Cartwright
Imagination equals nostalgia for the past, the absent; it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
- Cyril Connolly
Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.
- John Dryden
The incurable ills are the imaginary ills.
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
- Albert Einstein
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein, in "On Science"
In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary instincts.
- Albert Einstein
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
- Albert Einstein
The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
- Albert Einstein
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
- Albert Einstein
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
- Albert Einstein
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other; for images are the brood of desire.
- George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans Cross)
But what is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public.
- Epictetus
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
- Jacques Anatole I. France (Jacques Anatole Thibault)
In her the imagination and fancy have such lively play, that the homeliest principles assume forms of beauty. In intellectual pursuits she is destined to excel by her fine sensibilities, her nice observations, and exquisite tastes, while man is appointed to investigate the laws of abstruse sciences, and perform in literature and art the bolder flights of genius.
- Justin Dewey Fulton, The True Woman
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
- Pierre Jules Theophile Gautier
There is nothing more fearful than imagination without taste.
[Ger., Es ist nichts furchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne Geschmack.]
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Spruche in Prosa (III)
Men as yet need some help to their imagination. There remains still room for a little illusion. It is better for men, it is better for women, that each somewhat idealize the other. Much is lost when life has lost its atmosphere, and is reduced to naked fact.
- Gail Hamilton (pseudonym of Mary Abigail Dodge)
Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Such is the power of imagination, that even a chimerical pleasure in expectation affects us more than a solid pleasure in possession.
- Henry Home, Lord Kames
Imagination is the organ through which the soul within us recognizes a soul without us; the spiritual eye by which the mind perceives and converses with the spiritualities of nature under her material forms; which tends to exalt even the senses into soul by discerning a soul in the objects of sense.
- Henry Norman Hudson
It is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it is irrepressible, unconfinable; that when the real world is shut out, it can create a world for itself, and with a necromantic power can conjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant visions to make solitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of a dungeon.
- Washington Irving
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
[Fr., Celui qui a de l'imagination sans erudition a des ailes, et n'a pas de pieds.]
- Joseph Joubert
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
- Joseph Joubert
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
- John Keats (1)
Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and not a quality; it looks before and after, it gives the form that makes all the parts work together harmoniously toward a given end, its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as a servant of the will. Imagination, as it is too often misunderstood, is mere fantasy, the image-making power, common to all who have the gift of dreams.
- James Russell Lowell
When I could not sleep for cold
I had fire enough in my brain,
And builded with roofs of gold
My beautiful castles in Spain!
- James Russell Lowell, Aladdin (st. 1)
The human race is governed by its imagination.
[Fr., C'est l'imagination qui gouverne le genre humain.]
- Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I)
Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.
- Ouida (pseudonym of Marie Louise de la Ramee)
Imagination decides everything.
- Blaise Pascal
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in this world.
- Blaise Pascal
The world of reality has its limits, the world of imagination is boundless.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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
Imagination is that faculty which arouses the passions by the impression of exterior objects; it is influenced by these objects, and consequently it is in affinity with them; it is contagious; its fear or courage flies from imagination to imagination; the same in love, hate, joy, or grief; hence I conclude it to be a most subtle atmosphere.
- John Russell (1)
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks has strong imagination
That if he would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear?
- William Shakespeare
The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.
- William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night's Dream
(Theseus at V, i)
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
- William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night's Dream
(Theseus at V, i)
This is the very coinage of your brain.
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.
- William Shakespeare,
Hamlet Prince of Denmark
(Gertrude, Queen of Denmark at III, iv)
This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.
- William Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost
(Holofernes at IV, ii)
Look what thy soul holds dear, imagine it
To lie that way thou goest, not whence thou com'st.
Suppose the singing birds musicians,
The grass whereon thou tread'st the presence strewed,
The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more
Than a delight measure or a dance;
For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite
The man that mocks at it and sets it light.
- William Shakespeare,
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
(Gaunt at I, iii)
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
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
A vile imagination, once indulged, gets the key of our minds, and can get in again very easily, whether we will or no, and can so return as to bring seven other spirits with it more wicked than itself; and what may follow no one knows.
- Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The imagination never dies.
- Edmund Clarence Stedman
Imagination is not thought, neither is fancy reflection; thought paceth like a hoary sage, but imagination hath wings as an eagle.
- Martin Farquhar Tupper
Whatever one man is capable of conceiving, other men will be able to achieve.
- Jules Verne
But thou, that did'st appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation.
- William Wordsworth, Yarrow Visited
