1000 Best Imagination Quotes

Best Imagination Quotes

Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child. Jonathan Kozol

Theatre is about the collective imagination... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV. Simon McBurney

Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination. Lily Tomlin

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. George Santayana

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is. Horace Walpole

I always appreciated the magnitude of my mother's imagination. She always saw beauty in what was broken, and she'd preserve it. Blake Lively

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess. Samuel Johnson

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world. Blaise Pascal

The really best acting is children in a playground or in a backyard. They're just lost in their imagination. The backyard isn't a pirate ship or a jungle, in the same way that the soundstage isn't Shambala. Nolan North

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. Albert Einstein

Respect your parents. What they tell you is true. Hard work, dedication and faith will get you anything. Imagination will drive itself. You can get anything you want, but you have to have faith behind all your ideas. Stick to your goals and have an undying faith. Russell Simmons

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell. John Adams

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

Everything you do on set is directly related to your imagination when you read the script for the first time. Ewan McGregor

J.K. Rowling is a talented storyteller, but she has also used the style and technique of modern television and cinema media, which seizes the imagination by pummelling it, bombarding it with powerful stimuli, in a rapid pace, with plenty of emotional rewards. Michael O'Brien

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination. Ray Bradbury

Imagination is the air of mind. Philip James Bailey

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. Jorge Luis Borges

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory. Thomas Jefferson

Growing up in a suburban home, the world seems so massive to you. It seems like cities are so big and so far away, and there's so much in them. So your imagination runs wild, instead of when you are born in the middle of Manhattan, you'd know, like, that this is the biggest city. Shawn Mendes

Nobody would know it to look at me, but the movies I liked as a kid were musicals - 'All That Jazz,' 'Hair,' 'Fame,' 'Annie,' all that stuff - that's where my little youthful imagination was. Juliette Lewis

I try to decorate my imagination as much as I can. Franz Schubert

My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Tom Waits

I've learned that borders are where the actual ends, but also where the imagination and the story begins. Amy Purdy

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination. Ray Bradbury

Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story. Amy Bloom

Being on a trapeze is like dreaming. I feel totally outside of myself when I'm flying. You know, designing shoes, my imagination is flying in my drawings. Christian Louboutin

You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself. Milan Kundera

Karma is experience, and experience creates memory, and memory creates imagination and desire, and desire creates karma again. If I buy a cup of coffee, that's karma. I now have that memory that might give me the potential desire for having cappuccino, and I walk into Starbucks, and there's karma all over again. Deepak Chopra

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination. Alexander Cockburn

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Reality has always been too small for the human imagination. We're always trying to transcend. Brenda Laurel

One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet. Joseph Joubert

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free. Manuel Puig

I can imagine few things more trying to the patience than the long wasted days of waiting. Robert Falcon Scott

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader. Katherine Paterson

Because of my faith and my imagination, I was able to enjoy my childhood, even though it was tough. Donna Brazile

I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons. Billy Collins

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. Richard P. Feynman

I'm essentially the result of other people's imagination. And that's fine. Because of other people's imagination, I've played parts I would never have thought I could do. Still, I've never had a hankering or an ambition for any particular role. John Hurt

You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place. Robert J. Sawyer

My father used to say to me, 'The only limit to your success is your own imagination.' I actually believed that - like, I'm still coming to terms with the fact that I might not be an Olympic figure skater. Shonda Rhimes

There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination. William Godwin

Well, I think that as a country, we've drifted away from appreciating the importance of imagination. Terry Brooks

What adults don't always understand is that to a kid, a comic book is like a movie. My Marvel comics took my imagination to other places - other galaxies. Angela Bowie

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination. Christina Ricci

The Anthroposophical Society is different from other societies in that it will not tolerate any figments of the imagination in its organization but is constructed on the basis of reality. Rudolf Steiner

The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new - and sometimes unexpected - directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations. A liberal arts education is designed to equip students for just such flexibility and imagination. Drew Gilpin Faust

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. L. Frank Baum

My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination. Kenneth Branagh

Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted. Blaise Pascal

'Castle' is a guy living in a fantasy world. He's in his imagination, writing these stories of murder. Nathan Fillion

I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination. Julian Assange

I have enough love to last me a lifetime! Thank God I'll never lose my imagination and my passion. That's really what it is. I'm still passionate about what I do. Teena Marie

I enjoy working on a movie that lets your imagination run wild, it's great to be a part of and watch. Chris Hemsworth

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. Noam Chomsky

When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do. Walt Disney

New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination and also your sense of what the market could stand got very, very sharp. Margo Jefferson

When you are young your imagination is so clear. Nina Blackwood

Art is about imagination. When you look at a picture from Salvador Dali, that's about imagination. When you look at Picasso, that's about imagination. Doing stuff from your heart. LL Cool J

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. Edward Abbey

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. Malcolm Gladwell

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you. Susan Sarandon

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination. John Keats

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

Football has that wonderful gift of being accessible. You don't need much gear, a coach, or a lifeguard. You just need your imagination, strong legs, and a couple of friends, and it's a game. Wangechi Mutu

I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined. Edmund White

The idea was always going to be that each year is a stand-alone story, which did make it easier on some level. It also requires the network to have the creative imagination to say, 'This is also 'Fargo,' you know what I mean? Noah Hawley

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially. James Salter

Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination. Marquis de Sade

I've read up on magic, and I think it sets you free, and it gives you hope. You can explore worlds you didn't know existed. It stretches your imagination, and I like my own imagination to be stretched and also the children I'm telling the story to. It gives you a sense of wonder. Jenny Nimmo

Learning is the new skill. Imagination, creation and asking new questions are at its core. Sugata Mitra

I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings. Kathryn Lasky

When France was the only reference for chefs to learn, you could go everywhere in the world, and they would copy dishes directly because they didn't have much expanded imagination or technique or knowledge. Daniel Boulud

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free. Lawrence Durrell

We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality. Judy Garland

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it. Jill Lepore

There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism. Twyla Tharp

Many hedge fund managers have become billionaires; perhaps this - plus their reputations as the smartest guys in the room - is why they have captured the investing public's imagination. Barry Ritholtz

Games are the way we keep romance alive. They're based in human hardwiring. Playing hard-to-get or leaving a little to the imagination allows the woman to be wooed and appreciated and the man to be challenged and intrigued. Helen Fisher

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. John Updike

The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies. Neil Gaiman

When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception. Emile Coue

Dolls fire our collective imagination, for better and - too often - for worse. From life-size dolls the same height as the little girls who carry them, to dolls whose long hair can 'grow' longer, to Barbie and her fashionable sisters, dolls do double duty as child's play and the focus of adult art and adult fear. Ellen Datlow

I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads - in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation - that if I really want to change my life, I might best begin by changing my mind. Pico Iyer

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography. John Irving

As a viewer, I really want to watch author-backed stories, and there is something amazing about thrillers, the way it captivates your imagination. Anushka Sharma

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is. Vince Vaughn

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

I can be fascinated with very little things. The clouds stimulate my imagination, and sometimes I just sit somewhere and go on dreaming for a long time. Your head is also a computer. When you're dreaming, you are simulating a world in which you are living. Theo Jansen

One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm. Ella Maillart

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination. Carl Jung

Man lives by imagination. Havelock Ellis

If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted. Charles Horton Cooley

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit. Peter Ackroyd

Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination. Al Gore

I'm nosey, and I have a great imagination. So it's not necessarily things I have to go through, but it's things people I know or my family is going through, and I hear about it, and I think, 'That sounds like a great song.' Becky G

For some reason I can't explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age. Joshua Bell

The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world. Across the centuries, Passover has never lost its power to inspire the imagination of successive generations of Jews with its annually re-enacted drama of slavery and liberation. Jonathan Sacks

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

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability. Thomas Huxley

In imagination, there's no limitation. Mark Victor Hansen

An idea is salvation by imagination. Frank Lloyd Wright

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow. George Berkeley

I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me. Meryl Streep

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

Some stories are true that never happened. Elie Wiesel

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant. Victor Hugo

For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination. Maxwell Maltz

From the boys' point of view, scouting puts them into fraternity-gangs, which is their natural organisation, whether for games, mischief, or loafing; it gives them a smart dress and equipments; it appeals to their imagination and romance; and it engages them in an active, open-air life. Robert Baden-Powell

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do. Rhys Ifans

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth. John Keats

When I start a picture, I always have a script, but I change it every day. I put in what occurs to me that day out of my imagination. You start on a voyage; you know where you will end up but not what will occur along the way. You want to be surprised. Federico Fellini

If they want to talk about aliens and anything like that... that's part of the gift God gave us. That's what makes life exciting. We're pretty stuck, you know. What gives flight to our life is our imagination. Michael Moriarty

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether. Luis Bunuel

So many of Spielberg's films inspired my imagination growing up. And then there are British films like 'The Full Monty' and 'Waking Ned Devine' that took me to places I really loved, with characters I just thought were amazing. But the films of Luc Besson showed me France - a really cool side of France. Doug Liman

Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill. Yuval Noah Harari

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk. John Keats

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. Ada Lovelace

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

I came from a childhood where I spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time just living with my imagination, and a certain amount of the adult world was kind of alienating. Chris Cornell

Believing you're something that you're not excites the mind and the imagination. And it's hopeful. Orlando Bloom

If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it. William Arthur Ward

No breed of cats in its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even slightly ungraceful - a record against which must be pitted the depressing spectacle of impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously shapeless and shaggy Airedales, and the like. H. P. Lovecraft

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like. Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination. Napoleon Hill

Preschool children are virtuosos of imagination. Benjamin Spock

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

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty. Albert Einstein

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun. Taylor Swift

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all. Anatole France

Few people have the imagination for reality. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted. Aesop

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world. Jerry Saltz

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives. Salman Rushdie

We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage. Jesus and the early Christians had a marvelous political imagination. They turned all the presumptions and ideas of power and blessing upside down. Shane Claiborne

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels. Luigi Pirandello

My imagination was no competition for nature. Jim Toomey

There aren't any fences to the imagination, and so there shouldn't be any for books. Matt Haig

Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are. Vernon Howard

Essentially, I'm untrained, so I just go with my imagination and try to put myself as solidly as I can into the shoes of whatever person I'm going to be playing. Christian Bale

I have a visual imagination. Sylvia Plath

Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing. Quincy Jones

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. Anne Graham Lotz

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life. Samuel Ullman

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination. Immanuel Kant

Genius is an African who dreams up snow. Vladimir Nabokov

You have to come in and be that character when you walk into the room. That's what one of my first acting teachers taught me. You know, don't go in there being Jennifer and then expect to flip and change, because they're not going to have that imagination. Jennifer Lopez

It's what you don't see that keeps you on the edge of your seat in any kind of film - leave it to the imagination of the viewer. Christopher Lee

I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it. Keith Haring

All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose. Brian Tracy

It is quite amazing how hard the subconscious works when it is made to understand that this life is not a rehearsal, there is no safety net and no assurance of any final closure. It is also quite appalling to realize how catatonic the imagination can become when we hedge our bets, opt for the safer direction at every fork in the path. John Burdett

Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process. LeVar Burton

The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination. John Cassavetes

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it. Lawrence M. Krauss

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope. Ursula K. Le Guin

I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. Richard Dawkins

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination? Jane Campion

You cannot write a book unless it is totally inhabiting your imagination and you are totally engrossed with it. Which is a kind word for obsession. Kate Forsyth

I have more of a vivid imagination than I have talent. I cook up ideas. It's just a characteristic. Francis Ford Coppola

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

Imagination is but another name for super intelligence. Edgar Rice Burroughs

In your imagination, you can perfect things in a way you can't do in your everyday life. Washed Out

The general effect of viewing 'Jumanji' is thrilling. I was able to see on film a thing that at one point had only existed in my imagination. I got to see the images from my book come alive. Chris Van Allsburg

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art. Khalil Gibran

Well, I think that - I think leadership's always been about two main things: imagination and courage. Paul Keating

I find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement. Ada Lovelace

Gender fluidity is not really feeling like you're at one end of the spectrum or the other. For the most part, I definitely don't identify as any gender. I'm not a guy; I don't really feel like a woman, but obviously I was born one. So, I'm somewhere in the middle, which - in my perfect imagination - is like having the best of both sexes. Ruby Rose

I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age. George R. R. Martin

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible. Wayne Dyer

When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it. Steve Erickson

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed. Henry Ford

In Ronald Reagan's chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears. Rick Perlstein

We have the universe to roam in in imagination. It is our virtue to be infinitely varied. The worst tyranny is uniformity. George William Russell

I always felt that what is scary is actually hearing someone tell you what they think they see. That sense of invisibility makes things a lot scarier, since your imagination tends to fill in the gaps. James Wan

I admired Stephen Daldry very much; I think he's a brilliant director, and also, I feel close to him because he has a lot of theater behind him. He's also a man of great imagination and a lovely sense of humor. Max von Sydow

No film has captivated my imagination more than 'King Kong.' I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old. Peter Jackson

The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence. Eddie Rickenbacker

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. J. K. Rowling

Feynman once said, 'Science is imagination in a straitjacket.' It is ironic that in the case of quantum mechanics, the people without the straitjackets are generally the nuts. Lawrence M. Krauss

True change takes place in the imagination. Unknown

I like crafts that come out of poverty or necessity. There used to be hobby shops where you'd get your supplies, and then you'd use your imagination. Amy Sedaris

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The new age of terrorism isn't on the battlefield: it's in your own backyard. Whether it's at a concert in France or a restaurant in the United States, terrorism doesn't have to happen in a military installation by any stretch of the imagination. Bill Goldberg

I've got an overactive brain. I enjoy work, I enjoy life, and I'm not good at relaxing. I've also never slept very much due to this overactive imagination and my brain constantly thinking. Rick Wakeman

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I've had hundreds of requests from journalists all over the world asking me to speak about Leicester, which is astonishing. It's captured the imagination. Gary Lineker

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

I use so much of myself in everything I do. I think every actor does because you have no one else to go to but yourself and your own imagination. Pierce Brosnan

Never, and I mean never, allow anyone else's ideas of who you can or can't become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a 'Keep Out' sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination. Wayne Dyer

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness. William Godwin

The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy. Virginia Postrel

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

I have a very strong imagination and have since I was a little kid. That is where a lot of my world comes from. It's like I'm off somewhere else. And I can have a problem in life because of that, because I'm always off in some other world thinking about something else. It's constant. James Gunn

Some of us are interested in directors, but really the vast majority of us are interested in actors. You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination. Danny Boyle

For those who have obtained unobstructed knowledge of Self, the world is seen merely as a bondage causing imagination. Ramana Maharshi

When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination. Tim Berners-Lee

Lyrically I like to use themes that make the listener use his or her imagination, and to give a little of the lessons I've learned in my own life. Ronnie James Dio

I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is. Lisa Unger

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. George Orwell

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized. Isabel Allende

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination. Christopher Isherwood

What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out. Wynton Marsalis

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination. Bryant H. McGill

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

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind. Joyce Carol Oates

Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven't pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Bronte likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system. Alexandra Adornetto

My imagination is a twisted place. Taylor Swift

Everybody in their own imagination decides what scary is. Yvonne Craig

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

The man who has no imagination has no wings. Muhammad Ali

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment. Jane Austen

A reader's own imagination is a far more powerful form of CGI than anything any movie can provide because it's unique. In your own imagination, you can enter all sorts of worlds, and they are unique to you because no other reader will interpret a book the same way. Mark Billingham

I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves. J. G. Ballard

You - and I have to remind myself of this - are capable beyond your wildest imagination. Priscilla Chan

What is now proved was once only imagined. William Blake

If you have a good inner life, you don't get lonely. I've got a good imagination. I don't miss romance. Diana Rigg

There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can't even fight against because they've been there so long that they've become part of the Western imagination of China. Ken Liu

This world is but a canvas to our imagination. Henry David Thoreau

The source and center of all man's creative power... is his power of making images, or the power of imagination. Robert Collier

A novel is a relationship, you know? When you read a book, the writer has done half the work, and you're doing half the work. You're providing the imagination; the words are turning into pictures in your mind. There's an active relationship that's going on. Noah Hawley

In schools giving students a full education, not to create great artists but about the right to have full expression and imagination and creativity, along with an acknowledgement that everybody learns differently. You try and you fail and you try again. All those skills are useful in the workplace, too. Damian Woetzel

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there. Richard Bach

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

It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others. Alexander McCall Smith

Imagination tends to be truly useful if accompanied by the power of mental control - if the worlds in one's head can be purposefully manipulated and distinguished from the real one outside it. Paul Bloom

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos. Milan Kundera

I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse. Walt Disney

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos. Kerry Thornley

Self-reliance - that's a dirty word to Democrats. They want people to believe that self-reliance means you don't do anything with anybody. They don't want it thought of as accepting responsibility for one's life. Enterprise. Imagination. Independence. Entrepreneurism. Rush Limbaugh

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

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination. Richard Wright

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination. Oscar Wilde

Free enterprise empowers entrepreneurs who have ideas and imagination, investors who take risks, and workers who hone their skills and offer their labor. Paul Ryan

As an actor, whether I'm playing Othello on stage or David Estes on 'Homeland,' that ability to give into your imagination is something that I enjoy. David Harewood

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil. Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much. Ta-Nehisi Coates

Anything that stimulates the public's imagination about the nobility and the importance of space exploration is something that I'm very excited to be a part of. Ron Howard

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. Edgar Allan Poe

I think most of the time you can make something happen, and it's about not letting your imagination be limited by that. Jane Goldman

The power of imagination makes us infinite. John Muir

We can conceive of eternity because we cannot conceive of a cessation of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest star and see infinite space beyond. Robert Green Ingersoll

I do not stick to rules when cooking. I rely on my imagination. Akshay Kumar

There is nothing that human imagination can figure brilliant and enviable that human genius and skill do not aspire to realize. William Godwin

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people. John Henrik Clarke

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory. Emile M. Cioran

The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace. Virginia Postrel

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. Frank Capra

Everything is creative. It's all relative to me. No matter what, you've gotta use your imagination, use your senses. Action Bronson

I don't like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it's your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination. Mark Ruffalo

I've always had a slightly overactive imagination. Daniel Radcliffe

The more ships have grown in size and consequence, the more their place in our imagination has shrunk. Rose George

All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase. Derek Walcott

You think in a different way when you don't have any money. The joy of poverty is that you use your imagination to come up with stuff. Amy Sedaris

Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey. Jerry Spinelli

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination. Lawrence Durrell

Wine and women do not go with song. Alcohol is the worst enemy of the imagination. Patrick Kavanagh

Faith is spiritualized imagination. Henry Ward Beecher

Reality is the richest thing there is, the most important thing there is. Our imagination allows us to live an artificial life that is wonderful, extremely rich, but I don't believe any artist would dare to say that artifice is better than real life. Mario Vargas Llosa

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder. Ronald Reagan

I had a very happy childhood, but I still used my imagination as a leisure resort. Geraldine McCaughrean

Fantasy mirrors desire. Imagination reshapes it. Mason Cooley

From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all. Geoffrey S. Fletcher

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!' Linda Grant

Imagination - that's the future for us. Jan Brett

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

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim. Michael Ignatieff

The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible. Steven Spielberg

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death. Robert Fulghum

With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour. Theodore Gericault

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. Michelangelo

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity. Jean Dubuffet

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

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt. Henry George

But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there. Roger McGuinn

I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. Man Ray

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. Antonio Tabucchi

We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way. Sue Monk Kidd

The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. Alfred Whitney Griswold

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet. Joseph Joubert

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, 'Just watch!' Bill Bradley

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up. Tom Robbins

I think New York is a good place to write in general because it's a grid. It's organized. You know where you are on the map. That centers you, and your imagination is perhaps freer to roam. Alex Turner

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. H. P. Lovecraft

I know there's been a lot that's been said about animated voice work, as though it's 'you can do this in your jeans and there's no camera and no pressure there. It's no big deal. It's easy.' The truth is, it's really a great test: how deep is your ability is to access your imagination? Nicolas Cage

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. Ursula K. Le Guin

Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will. Robert Doisneau

When you believe in what you're doing and use your imagination and initiative, you can make a difference. Samuel Dash

We didn't get to see a lot of movies in my house growing up, so the first time I got to go to the movies - I think it was 'E.T.' - I was like, 'Oh my God, somebody else gets my imagination!' Matt Bomer

When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal. Ta-Nehisi Coates

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. H. L. Mencken

Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy. John Darnielle

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination. Voltaire

Background scores allow me an absolute flight of the imagination, and I travel in my mind's eye. I do not like the scores to have vocal notes, because they act as a limitation to these flights of fancy. Nawazuddin Siddiqui

A lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself, and lingering and hanging in the darkness is often - I say this against myself - a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light. John O'Donohue

Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality. Jonas Salk

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me. Robertson Davies

Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds, by means of what are commonly termed par excellence the exact sciences, may then, with the fair white wings of imagination, hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live. Ada Lovelace

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind. Brit Marling

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination? Ellen Ullman

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination. Alan Rickman

It's not only imagination, it's the distortion of the vision. You suddenly think, This person is idealistic, this person is strong, this person has dreams, when you know better most of the time. You put what you want to see on people. Olivier Martinez

I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination. Nick Cave

Fantasy has a dark side to it. It also has a light hemisphere - the power of the human imagination to keep going, to imagine a better tomorrow. Tim O'Brien

Anything I did with the WWE was not therapeutic by any stretch of the imagination. The reality is that nobody's going to tell you that, because they have an umbilical cord hooked to Vince McMahon. I, ladies and gentlemen, do not. Bill Goldberg

Justice is to be found only in imagination. Alfred Nobel

I'll tell you this: You have to remember to chase and catch your dreams, because if you don't, your imagination will live in empty spaces, and that's nowhere land. Gary Busey

For me, it's always a failure of the imagination. I have that anxiety that time is passing, that everything is ultimately fleeting and impermanent. I better take advantage of every single moment. Jason Silva

I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back? Christina Aguilera

One thinks of toys and play as an area of great novelty and potentiality where all sorts of responses can be developed. The fact that adults are allowing their imaginations to have activity through toy kinds of objects is a further reflection of the belief in the imagination of the adult mind. Brian Sutton-Smith

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. David Walliams

There is no such thing as death; life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Bill Hicks

Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn't shake but inside I was shaking. James L. Farmer, Jr.

When James Bond presses the watch and the car explodes, the writer doesn't go into the science of it. One should leave it to the leap of faith. I have tried to explain as much as possible, and what I can't, I have left it to people's imagination. Ravi Subramanian

Hope is a key ingredient in what drives creativity - the hope of bringing to life what exists in the imagination, of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary - so it's completely logical that Hollywood is the entertainment capital of the world. It's full of people bursting with the desire to make the world laugh, cry, think. Bonnie Hammer

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it. Alex Guarnaschelli

When I was thirteen, I was in a supermarket with my mother, and for no reason at all, I picked up a science-fiction book at the checkout stand and started reading it. I couldn't believe I was doing that, actually reading a book. And, man, it opened up a whole new thing. Reading became the sparkplug of my imagination. Mark Bradford

My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever? Barbara Corcoran

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. Albert Einstein

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions. Albert Einstein

Visualization - it's been huge for me. Your mind doesn't know the difference between imagination and reality. You can't always practice perfectly - my fingers will play a little bit out of tune, or my dance moves might not be as sharp - but in my mind, I can practice perfectly. Lindsey Stirling

The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Henry Moore

I understand what it is to go through emotional trauma and retreat and go into the world of your imagination. I understand how art and music can be a place of safety in a world of reinvention. Sam Taylor-Wood

Syria may appear to be a small country, but it is just the type of entangled conflict that can lead to a world catastrophe. It does not take much imagination to see Syria as the Sarajevo of the 21st century, leading to world war. Ahmed Zewail

There's no reason for your imagination to be fettered by money. Kevin McCloud

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake? Leonardo da Vinci

I seriously believed that my last hour was approaching, and yet, so strange is imagination, all I thought of was some childish hypothesis or other. In such circumstances, you do not choose your own thoughts. They overcome you. Jules Verne

A young imagination is bold, likes to make bigger leaps. It likes to, well, imagine that the dustbuster is a dinosaur; that the computer mouse is a hotrod; that the box is a cave; that the rawhide is a torch... or a baton... or something. Mo Rocca

When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words. Alejandro Jodorowsky

I visualize things in my mind before I have to do them. It's like having a mental workshop. Jack Youngblood

'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated. Junot Diaz

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist. Vladimir Nabokov

I had a good imagination and I still have one; a child-like imagination that hasn't gone away. Laura Linney

There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality. Jonas Salk

I tend to like to read history - recent history, because I find that much more intriguing than just a writer's imagination. Jesse Ventura

The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen. Melvyn Bragg

I'm focused on the work. And now I've done 'Morris' and 'Mr. Robot,' my appetite is whet to go deeper. It's fun, and it's challenging, and it stretches me. I'm not saying I'm done with comedy by any stretch of the imagination. I'm saying, yeah, let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Craig Robinson

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride. Nicolas Cage

If there is a book that the script came from you have to read it, you have to see what you can get out of it: mood, back story and things that may not even be in the film. They kick off your imagination and broaden the character, I think. Miranda Otto

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute. Franklin Pierce Adams

I used my imagination to make the grass whatever color I wanted it to be. Whoopi Goldberg

I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic, post-comet, post-whatever it was, so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid, that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to. Gillian Flynn

Mr. Bergman had a great imagination and saw the possibilities within every one of his actors, and he gave us great challenges. It was very inspiring. Max von Sydow

I love our shared island, our shared Ireland and its core decency. I love it for its imagination and its celebration of the endless possibilities for our people. Michael D. Higgins

I think artists can influence only through making music that challenges people, excites them and flips them out. Music that repeats what you know in ever-decreasing derivation, that's unchallenging and unstimulating, deadens our minds, our imagination and our ability to see beyond the hell we find ourselves in. Thom Yorke

My life has been a gift up to this point, and I've been blessed beyond my wildest imagination. And wherever this ride takes me is where I'm going. Sean Hannity

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

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully. William C. Bryant

In an era of parental paranoia, lawsuit mania and testing frenzy, we are failing to inspire our children's curiosity, creativity, and imagination. We are denying them opportunities to tinker, discover, and explore - in short, to play. Darell Hammond

A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache. Catherine the Great

I have an imagination because my life is so boring that my imagination lets me get off the reality of what's going on. Dave Attell

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you. Hilary Mantel

Children depend mightily on animals for comfort, inspiration, imagination, and art. And parents have long recognized this. Lydia Millet

In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman. J. C. Watts

I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all. Sufjan Stevens

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. Simone Weil

Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year, and we didn't get anything at all like that. Robert J. Sawyer

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. Edward Hopper

It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high. Timothy Morton

With imagination and personal creativity, people who sew can design the way they look to suit themselves. Issey Miyake

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

Vision gets the dreams started. Dreaming employs your God-given imagination to reinforce the vision. Both are part of something I believe is absolutely necessary to building the life of a champion, a winner, a person of high character who is consistently at the top of whatever game he or she is in. Emmitt Smith

My proudest moment was probably when my oldest boy finished law school and went on to become an FBI agent. It was just beyond my imagination that - with my background - my own son would become an FBI agent. Frank Abagnale

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

And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five. James Merrill

I really like Kickstarter because you don't have to be a Medici to fund the arts and sciences or to get behind a big idea or a person that sparks your imagination. It's a type of microfunding directed toward creators. Lisa Gansky

I started track and field when I was 12 and didn't get to an Olympic Games until I was nearly 23. By any stretch of the imagination that's a very long apprenticeship. Sebastian Coe

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. Salvador Dali

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else. Salman Rushdie

I don't want to go on much longer, really. I think that would suggest a lack of imagination. A certain lack of dignity also. Morrissey

I discovered writing children's books was a way to keep living in my imagination like a child. So I wrote a number of books before I started 'Magic Tree House.' Then, once I got that, I never looked back because I could be somewhere different in every single book. Mary Pope Osborne

Some music comes from a real place; some music comes from your imagination. It's difficult to find out what's real and what's not, especially with the gangster stuff. Ice T

I don't profess to be Shonda Rhimes by any stretch of the imagination, or Dick Wolf. They're icons. I'm a filmmaker. Lee Daniels

True intelligence requires fabulous imagination. Ian Mcewan

Be bored and see where it takes you, because the imagination's dusty wilderness is worth crossing if you want to sculpt your soul. Nancy Gibbs

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. Carl Jung

Experience teaches that when the will and imagination are in conflict, the imagination usually wins. What we imagine may defeat our reason and make us slaves to what we taste, see, hear, smell, and feel in the mind's eye. The body is indeed the servant of the mind. Joseph B. Wirthlin

Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic. Terry Eagleton

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means. J. G. Ballard

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there. Beverly Cleary

You have many years ahead of you to create the dreams that we can't even imagine dreaming. You have done more for the collective unconscious of this planet than you will ever know. Steven Spielberg

For those without money, the road to that treasure house of the imagination begins at the public library. Pete Hamill

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination. Carlos Fuentes

Your heart will be shattered by sorrow if you force it to live in tomorrow's ephemeral imagination - world instead of in today's eternal reality - now. Sri Chinmoy

The Polar Express is about faith, and the power of imagination to sustain faith. It's also about the desire to reside in a world where magic can happen, the kind of world we all believed in as children, but one that disappears as we grow older. Chris Van Allsburg

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

I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be. Billy Connolly

The map we made of the 3,000-year-old city of Tanis requires no imagination. It has buildings, streets, admin complexes, houses - clear as day. Sarah Parcak

I have a good imagination. Look, I know what it feels like to have a broken heart. I know what it feels like to feel something for somebody. I'm just too weird to be in a relationship. Diane Warren

With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that. Linda Sue Park

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try! Dr. Seuss

To me, Berlin is as much a conceit as a reality. Why? Because the city is forever in the process of becoming, never being, and so lives more powerfully in the imagination. Rory MacLean

You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. Robin Williams

I'd love to play more challenging roles, characters that would stretch my comfort zone and imagination. Isabelle Fuhrman

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. C. S. Lewis

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope. Ursula K. Le Guin

I think my imagination dictates the technologies I use. But at the same time, my imagination can be technologic. Sometimes I see a tool and I know immediately how to use it, but most of the time I use the tool for an idea I already have. Michel Gondry

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it. Elizabeth Bowen

I didn't like Barbie dolls, so I used to have this overactive imagination, and I used to pretend to be all these different things. My weird childhood fetishes seem to have come to life now as an actor. Sonam Kapoor

Jehovah God is truly rich far beyond the imagination of humankind. Joseph Franklin Rutherford

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

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage. Sydney J. Harris

I always wanted to write for children. When I was growing up, we were really poor. My mother had left, and it was all a mess. So I lived in my head a lot, and I would get lots of books for Christmas - from librarians and teachers - and they just fed my imagination. Jewell Parker Rhodes

I've developed a theory that there's an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you've got lots of imagination then you don't really need much money, and if you've got lots of money then you won't bother with much imagination. Alan Moore

Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are. Mason Cooley

People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can't do. Gretchen Rubin

One my favorite things is to go to the provinces of Russia and see the 18th century wood churches with the onion dome architecture. These humble wonders of incredible imagination of architects that were obviously not living in places like Paris or London, but they've created these amazing churches. Andre Leon Talley

You know what's better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life. Ryan Holiday

There are two 'Snow White' movies coming out for the same reason that you remember back in the day there was 'Armageddon' and then 'Deep Impact.' You know, 'Andromeda Strain' and then 'Outbreak.' Like, all of those things. It's common because basically studios have no imagination in making the decisions. Armie Hammer

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap. Stella Adler

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block. Paul Gauguin

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

I think music took hold of me and captured my imagination at such a formative age that I ascribe a mysteriousness to it, and I exalt it and take it seriously in a way that I think has just permeated my life ever since. And I'm less interested in music that is novelty or jokey or ironic. Carrie Brownstein

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination. Marcel Proust

When you gaze at stars and think about planets, the places it takes your imagination are amazing! You look up the sky, and you know the stars have always been here; they were referenced in biblical times and have always been present. They are somewhere up there in the future, and they guide you; they make you feel safe. Sarah Brightman

I've got quite a vivid imagination and I'm easily overwhelmed by sensations and things that are beautiful or scary. I don't think I've ever seen a ghost - I think I'm probably haunted by my own ghosts than real ones. Florence Welch

I don't think there is such a thing as pure imagination. I think it's a combination of memory and invention. Ethan Canin

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life. Lori Wilde

Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions. Ambrose Bierce

Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination. Floyd Skloot

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding. Isaac Newton

The outlaw, in the American imagination, is a subject of romance - a 'good' bad man, he is typically a master of escape, a crack shot, a ladies' man. David Grann

I can't satisfy myself with just trying to tie all of my imagination into music, especially when music is not appreciated as an art form as much as it used to be. Marilyn Manson

I feel that directors at times are like the janitors on the set. I am the secretary, I am the organizer, I am the maid, and I ask if they have eaten or rested. The best things are always out of your control. It's those moments that surpass the imagination that are thrilling. Jane Campion

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do. Anais Nin

It was just very interesting to me that certain types of women inspire people's imagination, and all of them were very difficult women. Elizabeth Wurtzel

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. Seamus Heaney

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination. John Irving

Make sure you visualize what you really want, not what someone else wants for you. Jerry Gillies

You have to have an unlimited imagination, an unlimited restraint on your inhibition when you're working. You have to even dare to fail, even in a scene, whatever it is. Viola Davis

I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else. Dawn French

A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate. Donald Trump

Ghost stories really scare me. I have such a big imagination that after I watch a horror movie like 'The Grudge', I look in the corners of my room for the next two days. Vanessa Hudgens

Normal television limits what you can do. With science fiction, you can exercise your imagination more. I fell in love with it. Gene Roddenberry

Let me just say that to imagine racism does not exist is imagination. And to imagine that it does not create its own set of problems is true imagination. So let's not imagine that racism is gone, extinguished, because it's not. We are seeing this in the top levels of the political arena, and we are seeing it very, very plainly. Phylicia Rashad

I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research. Maria Semple

I had an incredibly full life with my imagination: I used to have all sorts of trolls and things; I had a wonderful world around my toys and invented people. I don't mean I had imaginary friends; I just had this big imagination thing going on. I didn't need any imaginary friends, because I had so much other stuff going on. Kate Bush

I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically, so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously. Laura Hillenbrand

I feel like my imagination was crafted by Tolkien. He seemed to tap into that childhood intrigue of secret doors and hidden worlds. Richard C. Armitage

It's an imaginative thing we do; it's about immersing oneself in one's imagination. If you're a novelist, you do it with pen and paper. We do it with our bodies. Rupert Friend

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction. Marquis de Sade

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

If you don't have imagination, you stop being human; animals don't have imagination; Alzheimer's is the death of imagination. Devdutt Pattanaik

He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart. Washington Irving

Isn't it crazy to think that we've explored space more than we have explored the depths of our ocean? That just fires up my imagination about potential sea monsters and cool creatures, that kind of stuff. James Wan

My imagination is so far out there already. People couldn't imagine what goes on in my brain. Missy Elliott

Hypnosis is about shutting down the conscious mind and re-igniting the unconscious and the imagination, so while I give instructions to them under hypnosis, the contestants might interpret those instructions in all kinds of ways. Keith Barry

Vision - It reaches beyond the thing that is, into the conception of what can be. Imagination gives you the picture. Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own. Robert Collier

Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art. Austin O'Malley

Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe. Philip Guston

But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I'm kind of fascist with myself, you know. There's no discussion. There is an order. You follow it. Karl Lagerfeld

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. Gaston Bachelard

As long as I was well fed, I was a very, very nice child. I just used my imagination and played with Barbies. I was pretty easy. Sabrina Carpenter

In Judaism or Christianity and so forth, you invent rules that don't exist anywhere except in your imagination. You spend your life trying to gain points and to avoid all kinds of things that detract from your points. And if by the time you die you gather enough points, then you pass on to the next level, in Heaven. Yuval Noah Harari

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

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory. Edgar Degas

Growing up, I had a very vivid imagination and Leonardo was like my best imaginary friend that I spoke to. When things were tough, or I was scared in an unsafe environment, I always imagined that the Ninja Turtles would come to the rescue. Ruby Rose

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. Pablo Picasso

To make extra money, my parents would sell eggs and chickens. I was very little. I remember a chicken's head being chopped off with the chicken running around. I wasn't sure if my imagination was running away with me or if it really happened. It really happened. Michael Keaton

For me, when I do my best acting, it's mainly imagination. Then I really have a lot of fun with it. Michael Pena

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination. Ernest Hemingway

I'm a dreamer with lots of energy and a vivid imagination. That's the recipe for becoming an entertainer. Goldie Hawn

To accomplish great things we must first dream, then visualize, then plan... believe... act! Alfred A. Montapert

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly. Lauren Bacall

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. R. D. Laing

I always imagined I could be what I wanted to be. Chris Brown

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

Where there is no imagination there is no horror. Arthur Conan Doyle

Without imagination, there can be no genuine ardor in any pursuit or for any acquisition, and without imagination, there can be no genuine morality, no profound feeling of other men's sorrow, no ardent and persevering anxiety for their interests. William Godwin

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement. Alan Bennett

Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit. Doris Day

In this drawing we just let our imagination run wild. We visualized Superman toys, games, and a radio show - that was before TV - and Superman movies. We even visualized Superman billboards. And it's all come true. Joe Shuster

Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely? Howard Jacobson

I just have a relationship with my imagination. It's like my friend, almost. Steven Wright

John Kerry had a very vivid imagination as a young person. I mean, he actually did go and take his bicycle from Norway to go camp in Sherwood Forest to be around the ghost of Robin Hood. Douglas Brinkley

My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination, but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men, so I thought I would be a writer instead. Nicole Kidman

I think it was really important for me before I 'debuted myself' in front of the world to have a private life with my imagination and my writing for several years. That also made it so I didn't feel desperate for someone to find me. Jenny Zhang

Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and begin to build. Robert Collier

To bolster his right flank and attract women voters, John McCain had cynically opted for a running mate who was, by any stretch of the imagination, unqualified for a position a heartbeat away from the presidency. Jay Parini

Companies like Google and Facebook may offer jobs allowing or requiring imagination and creativity, but the whole of Silicon Valley accounts for only 3 percent of national income and a smaller percentage of national employment. Edmund Phelps

I had a pretty sexual imagination for a kid. Janet Jackson

Whether it's at a concert in France or a restaurant in the United States, terrorism doesn't have to happen in a military installation by any stretch of the imagination. Bill Goldberg

On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source of the imagination. You can travel farther in language than you can in any film. Sam Shepard

You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist. Azar Nafisi

I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare. Andrew Wyeth

Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities. Orison Swett Marden

Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes. Steve Erickson

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. William Butler Yeats

You have all the reason in the world to achieve your grandest dreams. Imagination plus innovation equals realization. Denis Waitley

I don't believe my house was haunted. I think I had an overactive imagination, and I was so convinced that those around me became convinced, too. Ryan Gosling

We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains. Anne Sullivan

My imagination ran 24/7, and to me, every problem was a challenge to solve and new product to create. It wasn't until I started teaching that I realized that not everyone's head worked the same way. Steve Blank

A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations. Russell Page

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. Percy Bysshe Shelley

If you use your imagination, you can look at any actress and see her nude... I hope to make you use your imagination. Hedy Lamarr

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. Seamus Heaney

My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio. Wayne McGregor

The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination. Ethan Canin

A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions. William Hazlitt

As one of four daughters, I grew up with an imaginary brother - wondering what it would have been like if one of us had been a boy. There's no question that there was a phantom boy child in my imagination when I was young. Siri Hustvedt

One of the things I've always loved about genre, comic books, science fiction and fantasy is that there's a certain level of playfulness to them, and pure imagination and creativity. Noah Hawley

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

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that. Robin Wright

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

I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In rising financial markets, the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination. James Buchan

The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment. Tony Robbins

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

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

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see. Duane Michals

I imagine that yes is the only living thing. e. e. cummings

Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real. Joel Kinnaman

I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me. Steven Spielberg

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope. Henry Ward Beecher

Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous. Vincent Van Gogh

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon. Will Self

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

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere. Ray Bradbury

I was a wild, mischievous kid, and I had tremendous imagination. Any experience I had, I'd try to reenact it. Adrien Brody

This is one of those cases in which the imagination is baffled by the facts. Adam Smith

I always have this imagination, something I want to use. I don't understand the idea of leisure time. Cher Wang

The human race is governed by its imagination. Napoleon Bonaparte

Men are mortal. So are ideas. An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering. Otherwise both will wither and die. B. R. Ambedkar

Great leaders communicate a vision that captures the imagination and fires the hearts and minds of those around them. Joseph B. Wirthlin

Kashmir, the 86,000-square-mile region in India's north, both is and isn't the India of the popular imagination. Hanya Yanagihara

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. Jessamyn West

Without imagination, I don't think there's any progress. Margot Lee Shetterly

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense. Helen Rowland

I don't think most books can be justifiably translated on screen. The film versions can't convey the right emotion, fuel your imagination or allow you to visualise every line the way books do. Sonam Kapoor

I wouldn't say I have comedy chops. I guess you get lucky with good writing because I don't think I'm a comedian by any stretch of the imagination. Michael Pena

Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too. Joyce Cary

When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination. Ellen Key

People can die of mere imagination. Geoffrey Chaucer

No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination. Anne Sullivan

Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth. Camille Paglia

I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries. Eavan Boland

The appeal of perfume is that it is at once ephemeral and empowering. It creates a shimmering invisible armor that lingers in a room long after its wearer has gone and infuses our imagination with a subtle power, hinting at a hidden identity. Mary Gaitskill

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

Imagination is an instrument of survival. Rogier van der Heide

For a 12-year-old with a hyperactive imagination who liked to dream of dreary gothic castles, suburban Florida felt a little stifling. Ransom Riggs

It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing. Jack Nicholson

I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true. Richard Dawkins

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. Edith Wharton

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

Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite. Jim Harrison

I want everyone to put their views forward, every union branch, every party branch, so we develop organically the strengths we all have, the imagination we all have. Jeremy Corbyn

Imagination and invention go hand in hand. Remember how lack of resources was never a problem in childhood games? Shift a few pieces of furniture around the living room, and you have yourself a fort. Alexandra Adornetto

My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me. Elizabeth Wurtzel

Human imagination is so much more potent than anything we could put down in words. Matt Bomer

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies. Karl Kraus

Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries. Marquis de Sade

To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to happiness. Thomas Traherne

Reading has been the fuel of my motivation: it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued. Zig Ziglar

Of the things which nourish the imagination, humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. John Millington Synge

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

It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas. Kevin J. Anderson

He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination. Tim O'Brien

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them. John Banville

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

You can't do it unless you can imagine it. George Lucas

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts. Richard Brinsley Sheridan

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. Salman Rushdie

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

I like endings that let your imagination do a lot of the work. Matt Bomer

Sexiness is in what you cover, not what you show. When you are covered, you leave a lot to people's imagination. People see the mystery in my eyes and find it sexy. Krystle D'Souza

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. Gloria Steinem

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open. John Berger

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure. Ben Okri

The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical. Jean Piaget

I'm not a passive person by any stretch of the imagination. Courteney Cox

I've studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique, that teaches you how to focus. It's mainly about daydreaming. And the technique's really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene. Sam Rockwell

Nothing speaks louder than an evocative photograph that stirs the imagination, tugs at the heart strings and engages the mind. Mark Carwardine

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Cynthia Ozick

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding. Thomas Carlyle

Obviously, as an actor, you have to embrace your imagination all the time, but when you're doing one of these films, you have to embrace your most childlike imagination - a sense of wonder and uninhibited playfulness. Katherine Waterston

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

But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination. Diana Krall

Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change. Stephen Covey

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. John Dewey

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel. Salman Rushdie

I always won in my imagination. I always hit the game-winning shot, or I hit the free throw. Or if I missed, there was a lane violation, and I was given another one. Mike Krzyzewski

No, no, I don't watch football. The last time I tried watching was the last Super Bowl. The problem I have is, you know, the graphic nature of my imagination; when I watch and see them meeting head onto head, helmet onto helmet, what flashes through my mind is what's going on in their brains. It's like torture to me. Bennet Omalu

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything. Henry Miller

Much of a poet's experience takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the power, the purity and height of his utterance may not seldom be the greater because experience here uses the voices of desire. George Edward Woodberry

I believe in the imperative to explore, so any project that I can be involved with that celebrates that, and expands people's imagination around that idea of pushing out, is one of the most positive things that I think I could be involved with. Ron Howard

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory. Gary Zukav

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

India lends itself well to fictionalization, but ultimately, it all depends on the writer's imagination. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I suffer from the delusion that every product of my imagination is not only possible, but always on the cusp of becoming real. Sean Parker

I never played Freddy as real. In the true bible of Wes Craven's outline for the films, Freddy only manifests himself in dreams. And a lot goes into a dream, not the least of which is imagination. So Freddy is secondhand information. Freddy is an urban legend that's been handed down to these teenagers over the years. Robert Englund

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. Brian Jacques

As a little girl, my destiny was stamped onto the canvas of my imagination at 5 years old. I was watching soaps with my grandmother... The most gorgeous black women I had ever seen in my life came out, and I knew that that is what I wanted to do - be fabulous and black and on TV. Niecy Nash

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

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination. George Jean Nathan

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life. Daniel J. Boorstin

I'm glad to have grown up in the countryside and played, and had to use my imagination rather than a TV and had to learn to act the hard way, to have dealt with the rejection. It's a life as well as a job, at the end the day, we all have to work for a living, but we have to have a life as well. Jason Clarke

A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning. Brad Henry

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall. Stephen Sondheim

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Albert Einstein

If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn. Margo Jefferson

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true. William Ralph Inge

Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them. Laurette Taylor

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed. Joseph Addison

Doubt is the father of invention. Ambrose Bierce

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

Encourage children to write their own stories, and then don't rain on their parade. Don't say, 'That's not true.' Applaud flights of fantasy. Help with spelling and grammar, but stand up and cheer the use of imagination. Gail Carson Levine

My best investment is my imagination, because it has never failed to bring me my greatest returns! Randy Castillo

People are always saying it's the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it's a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it's a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination. John Ralston Saul

Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king. Mark Van Doren

I think what's really the most ideal thing is for the player themselves, within their own imagination, to carve out what they view as being the essence of the character. Shigeru Miyamoto

It would be too frightening for me to consider myself a role model. But I like the idea of not being afraid of letting your imagination rule you, to feel the freedom of expression, to let creativity be your overwhelming drive rather than other things. Florence Welch

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led. Edgar Allan Poe

My mom would always read a book to me at night from when I was three. Now, I can't go to sleep without reading a book. At the same time, once I read, it's difficult for me to go to sleep, as I have an overactive imagination and I start thinking. Sonam Kapoor

I believed in myself. I never imagined myself as just an ordinary player. Imran Khan

It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care. Paul Farmer

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

I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination. Bruce Springsteen

If you got a good imagination, a lot of confidence and you kind of know what you are saying, then you might be able to do it. I know a lot of colorful characters at home that would make great actors. Jason Statham

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me. Kazuo Ishiguro

If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don't have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn't take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me. Julian Baggini

I loved the world of imagination. R. A. Salvatore

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

Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. James Cameron

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally. Calvin Trillin

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination. Sofia Kovalevskaya

If Copenhagen were a person, that person would be generous, beautiful, elderly, but with a flair. A human being that has certain propensities for quarrelling, filled with imagination and with appetite for the new and with respect for the old - somebody who takes good care of things and of people. Connie Nielsen

Imagination is the eye of the soul. Joseph Joubert

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

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities. Abraham Verghese

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. Eartha Kitt

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

A-POC unleashes the freedom of imagination. It's for people who are curious, who have inner energy - the energy of life and living. Issey Miyake

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive. Daniel Tammet

There's a logic today that places a greater value on celebrity the less it is accompanied by actual achievement. I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means. J. G. Ballard

I've never taken any issue off the table for lack of suitability. Only for lack of imagination. Garry Trudeau

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything. Alice Walker

Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination. Ludwig Wittgenstein

I really don't know where my interest in death comes from. Maybe I've just got a twisted imagination. The truth is, I haven't had a hugely eventful life - maybe I'm compensating in my creative life. Or maybe I'm just a bit sick. Laura Wade

My problem is that my imagination won't turn off. I wake up so excited I can't eat breakfast. I've never run out of energy. It's not like OPEC oil; I don't worry about a premium going on my energy. It's just always been there. I got it from my mom. Steven Spielberg

Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love. Gilbert Parker

I didn't choose Goldberg because I wanted to be the flagship for the Jewish movement, not by any stretch of the imagination. I chose Goldberg because no one else can own it. Bill Goldberg

Edgy is fine - I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination - but what's wrong with a good ol' belly laugh? I miss that. Carol Burnett

Passion is what gives meaning to our lives. It's what allows us to achieve success beyond our wildest imagination. Try to find a career path that you have a passion for. Henry Samueli

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. Charles M. Schwab

A child who has never fantasized about having other parents is seriously lacking in imagination. Fred G. Gosman

To have a great idea, have a lot of them. Thomas A. Edison

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary. David Bailey

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. William Shakespeare

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with. Thomas Sowell

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination. Tycho Brahe

The most important innovators often don't need any technologies - just imagination and acute sensitivity to people's needs. Geoff Mulgan

Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster. Al Gore

I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination. Anna Deavere Smith

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood. Jack Prelutsky

I'm an optimistic guy. I'm one of those big dreamers. I'm one of those kids with that annoying imagination. Tyler, The Creator

Imagination decides everything. Blaise Pascal

Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue. Ridley Scott

Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly. James Surowiecki

It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract; and therefore this must be as far above the other as judgment is a greater and nobler faculty than fancy or imagination. Robert South

I wanted to inspire every little girl who wants to be a dancer to fire their imagination about the joys of being on the stage. Darcey Bussell

Action set pieces are my absolute favorite thing to write. I'm pretty much always in the mood to do them, but music certainly helps the process. I usually brainstorm out the dynamics and choreography of a fight to music beforehand - it gives me the little sparks of imagination when I get to the gaps in my own creativity. Victoria Aveyard

I first came across the script for 'Macbeth' between the ages of 11 and 12; it was the first book that shook my life. Because I did not yet understand that I could simply purchase it in a bookstore, I copied much of it by hand and took it home. My childhood imagination pushed me to feel like a co-author of the play. Ismail Kadare

What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also. Julius Caesar

I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose. Elinor Wylie

People's imagination is the most effective tool in creating terror or dread. Matt Reeves

Whenever I am not traveling during the winter, I am pushing hard in the gym. Even when I am traveling, I try to fit a workout in at the hotel. And if the hotel doesn't have a gym? You can get a good workout in your room with an exercise band and some imagination. Charlie Kimball

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination. e. e. cummings

I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination. Cornelia Funke

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

My imagination was a great place to escape from all the anxiety and disapproval of my life... I had to live in my head... art was a way of making myself feel better. Philip Schultz

Our imagination just needs space. It's all it needs, that moment where you just sort of stare into the distance where your brain gets to sort of somehow rise up. Glen Hansard

It was David McCullough's 'The Johnstown Flood' that lit my imagination as to how I might one day go about writing book-length nonfiction, though my favorite of his books is 'Mornings on Horseback,' about the young Teddy Roosevelt. Erik Larson

I never in my wildest imagination dreamed that I would somehow become a sports commentator. Joe Rogan

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

A good comic explores the imagination, but it's always got to have those notes of truth running through it. Michael Pena

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. Thomas A. Edison

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

Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience. H. P. Lovecraft

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

I've always loved massive worlds, whether in fantasy or science fiction. I like the idea of making my own rules as well as utilizing everything that I love or inspires me. It's very freeing to know you can write a story that can be as big as your own imagination. Victoria Aveyard

Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public. Epictetus

All my life I've had the privilege to make my living with my imagination, and the most important thing has been to see my creative life grow. I was educated to do that and have lived accordingly. Tommy Lee Jones

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. Benjamin Disraeli

I think that being read to every night is the reason why I was plowing through volume after volume of 'Nancy Drew' books all by myself by the time I reached the first grade. I loved stories. I loved the escape. I had a vivid imagination. Rachel Nichols

I don't know about everyone else, but I really loved lunch and recess because it was an opportunity to get carried away with your imagination. Dichen Lachman

I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone; because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman. Claire Danes

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself. Ralph Fiennes

I don't mind if what they write about me has some truth in it. Pure imagination makes me feel sad about the whole thing. Shaheer Sheikh

In the beginning, we had a great deal of freedom, and Jerry wrote completely out of his imagination - very, very freely. We even had no editorial supervision to speak of, because they were in such a rush to get the thing in before deadline. But later on we were restricted. Joe Shuster

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm. Barbara Kingsolver

The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, 'Let us worship God.' If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, and the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor. Eugene H. Peterson

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling. Pat Conroy

We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex - but Congress can. Cullen Hightower

The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games. Adam Gopnik

I design all my sets. With my tour and my album artwork, I co-design that with people who are better at drawing than me. But I've got a good imagination. I went to art school so I understand how to communicate my ideas. Paloma Faith

Perhaps our imagination needs crime stories to fulfill some craving we have, as a way to assuage a darkness in ourselves. James Nesbitt

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. Percy Bysshe Shelley

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived. John Adams

The most imaginative people are the most credulous, for them everything is possible. Alexander Chase

Living in a small town, one of the keys to survival was your imagination. Nick Nolte

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read. Malorie Blackman

I grew up believing my sister was from the planet Neptune and had been sent down to Earth to kill me. I believed this because my sister Emily convinced me of it when I was a toddler. I think she'd seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers and her imagination ran away with her. There's a part of me that still believes it. Zooey Deschanel

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Sylvia Plath

Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists - with it all things are possible. Ida Tarbell

Imagination needs to be fed. Barbara Januszkiewicz

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. Michelangelo

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another. John Burroughs

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought. George Packer

I'll confess right here that I secretly wish I'd have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination. Berkeley Breathed

I don't know if I am a good, average, or bad writer, but I write fast. Everything I observe, my experiences and imagination come together while writing. Dhanush

The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere. Terence McKenna

If you're trying to learn how to act from a class, you're analyzing the teachers' movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that's wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It's your own imagination, and your own version of it. Shia LaBeouf

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader. John le Carre

When a child's mind develops and is heading in a certain direction, we murder that mentality, we murder that imagination, by saying, 'Now, that is all well and good, but now sit down and start to study.' Derek Walcott

You have to really use your imagination to refresh your daily life. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

I would love to do a western. I would love to play an explorer. That is always something that has really captured my imagination since I was a kid, like James Cook or Magellan or Earnest Shackleton. John C. Reilly

Don't stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want - freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind. James Altucher

Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have. James Dean

It's hard to see yourself as a princess because it involves a huge leap of the imagination and sort of requires you to believe you can be that, which is a scary, weird thing. Lily James

Proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of creative imagination. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Walter Gropius

Everything you can imagine is real. Pablo Picasso

Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. Sometimes they have more imagination than men. Katherine Johnson

I feel like 'Amelie' is very much an extension of me. She's a contemporary woman who sees the world through her imagination. Phillipa Soo

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

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates. Oscar Wilde

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. Maria Mitchell

Imagination creates reality. Richard Wagner

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow. William Blake

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose. Paul Theroux

I get ideas from my own personal experiences, from my imagination, and from my research and from old stories. Mary Pope Osborne

Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Tom Waits

But I could not imagine having a child and the child not having a relationship with music that opens up their mind and their imagination and teaches them things. Ali Shaheed Muhammad

My imagination completely controls me, and forever feeds the fire that burns with dark red light in my heart by bringing me the best dreams. I've always had a wild imagination, a big heart and a tortured soul so I feel that dark fantasy, love and horror are in my blood. Kim Elizabeth

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Wallace Stevens

I want to reach the heights of stardom beyond my imagination. Ranbir Kapoor

I was raised not to be afraid to show emotion or imagination. Javier Bardem

Vision is the true creative rhythm. Robert Delaunay

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused. Baruch Spinoza

Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world. Walt Disney

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader. John le Carre

I would love to meet J.K. Rowling and tell her how much I admire her writing and am amazed by her imagination. I read every 'Harry Potter' book as it came out and looked forward to each new one. I am rereading them now with my kids and enjoying them every bit as much. She made me look at jelly beans in a whole new way. Sheryl Sandberg

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth. Jean Giraudoux

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination. Lynn Nottage

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Albert Einstein

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive. Henry David Thoreau

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I was a very religious child - I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good - I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world. Yehuda Amichai

You can't make money without selling something real. You can't make something real without first imagination manifesting itself in your head. You can't have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings. James Altucher

My production style is all about imagination. I want my audience to use their imagination when they watch my videos. My goal is for my voice to be that little hope of encouragement in your head when you walk out your door. Michelle Phan

Often you hear stories about never working with children. I disagree because children still have that residual magical thinking. They haven't had their imagination knocked out of them by turning into adults and life experiences. Nicolas Cage

As a boy, the very words 'Liberty Bell' and 'Independence Hall' fired my imagination and made a profound and lasting impression on my mind. Throughout my struggle to secure national freedom for China, I have continuously dreamed of the day when she would assume the full stature of an independent, democratic nation. Chiang Kai-shek

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality. Wayne Dyer

Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. Stephen Leacock

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. Guy Davenport

I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination. Ellen Ullman

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate. Jose Ortega y Gasset

Few cities have been more definitely impressed upon the imagination of the world than San Francisco, this gray-hilled city on the peninsula by the hospitable bay, where Saint Francis protects the ships as he protected the birds of Assisi. Edwin Markham

The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from. Bryan Cranston

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination. Colm Toibin

I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free. Andrew Wyeth

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth. Cyril Connolly

All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers. Orison Swett Marden

Imagination is a pretty powerful thing, and when you're in the moment and you're riding a train and you're asked to look scared, I don't know, it just kind of works out. And in those moments where you're actually doing some of the stunts, then it's not so hard at all, because there's an actual fear there. Chris Pine

You experience the films through the actors, so they're all locked into your imagination in some kind of layer of fantasy or hatred or wherever they settle into your imagination. Danny Boyle

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model. Vincent Van Gogh

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

I'd stand on the side of the road when I was just a little girl singing on trash cans. People would roll down their windows saying, 'Isn't she cute'. I had a vivid imagination. I always pretended it was some big stage. Missy Elliott

I'm attracted to stories that excite my imagination, stories that, as I'm reading the script, I feel it, I can see it, I can hear the characters. I'm attracted to characters that are real, that tap into something inside me that I haven't explored yet. Tatiana Maslany

I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist. Susan Sarandon

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house. Maria Callas

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

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

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it. Daniel Boulud

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The Constitution did not even go into effect when Washington was inaugurated first President. The wisest men knew that it was only a figment of the imagination then. Charles A. Beard

Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain. David Hume

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. Henry David Thoreau

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from. Amy Tan

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Dr. Seuss

To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard. Bill Gates

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure. Billy Collins

Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party. Howard Jacobson

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Ralph Waldo Emerson

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with. James Anthony Froude

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments. Virginia Postrel

I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst. J. G. Ballard

People who don't see their nature and imagine they can practice thoughtlessness all the time are lairs and fools. Bodhidharma

When I think of Camelot, I think of the castle in France where we film, but I think it's wrong to lock it down to one place because it's all part of our imagination. They are legends for a reason. Their stories have endured for hundreds of years and, hopefully, they will for hundreds of years to come. Colin Morgan

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

Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination. Henry Miller

We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women. Adrienne Mayor

One is never fortunate or as unfortunate as one imagines. Francois de La Rochefoucauld

When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge, and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger's that year. Daniel Tammet

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature. Wallace Stevens

You know, working as an actor, I'm always working within my own imagination. Charles Keating

A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined to be superstitious or useless, prove today on examination to have been of immense value to mankind. Lafcadio Hearn

You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination. Charles de Gaulle

'Harry Potter' really harnessed the imagination of so many young-adult minds, and it's the same with the 'Divergent' series. Kate Winslet

I'd rather excite the imagination of a legion of readers and make pennies from each of them than hold off for a larger chunk of change from only a handful of fans. Hugh Howey

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. Alan Greenspan

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

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw. Damien Hirst

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

I used to lie in bed in my flat and imagine what would happen if there was a zombie attack. Simon Pegg

The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist. Pete Hamill

I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do. Trevor Nunn

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. John Lennon

One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning? Francis Cabot Lowell

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. William Blake

Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be. Nicolas Cage

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely. Marcus Aurelius

Woman is the sun, an extraordinary creature, one that makes the imagination gallop. Marcello Mastroianni

Loving a country is an act of the imagination. Michael Ignatieff

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. Edgar Allan Poe

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Bill Hicks

I've always had a really active imagination. Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Mine just took on a rather demonic form. Claire Danes

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it. Ursula K. Le Guin

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Pulp existed for 12 years before we got famous. Now, you could say that was just lack of imagination, but it's some kind of quality isn't it? Tenacity. You could also say it was sloth. Jarvis Cocker

I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake. Mary McCarthy

Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case, and I've fallen in love all my life, one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different, for better or worse. Mary Wesley

Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it. Robinson Jeffers

Illustrations can be a big window: a looking glass into the author's imagination. Tony DiTerlizzi

Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...'; And then do it. Duane Michals

God has given us an imagination, and our imagination is really the principle tool from which all creativity and artistry comes from. Erwin McManus

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

What I'm looking for is a self-promoting film; a movie which immediately gets people's imagination is something I can promote - a project which writes its own publicity. Jeremy Thomas

Cooking with kids is not just about ingredients, recipes, and cooking. It's about harnessing imagination, empowerment, and creativity. Guy Fieri

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future. Charles Kettering

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza. Franz Kafka

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

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts. Ray Bradbury

New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can't be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along! Arthur C. Clarke

It's a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know - we have to be able to imagine different worlds. Dee Rees

I simply believe food is too good to throw away - and Christmas leftovers can be a gastronomic opportunity for the well-skilled kitchen forager. With a little imagination, there are a million ways to use up leftovers rather than bin them. Tristram Stuart

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. Christian Nestell Bovee

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Daniel Bell

There was part of me that wanted to see the world and travel to distant places, but I could only do it in my imagination, so I read ferociously and imagined things. George R. R. Martin

I get irritated with the world. I get irritated with politicians. I get very irritated with governments and with corporations, but in terms of imagination - my imagination is always fertile. I'm either thinking of my own things or constantly engaged by the things that other people do. Patti Smith

I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination. Rick Riordan

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.' Tom Robbins

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension. J. K. Rowling

My imagination is closer to a child's imagination than to a grown-up's. Mary Pope Osborne

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

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more. Edouard Manet

We didn't have all the distractions that young people have today. We didn't have these incredible computer games and social networks to engage with. I understand that. But once young readers do discover reading, when they discover a book which they fall in love with, it really unleashes something new in their imagination. Mark Billingham

On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn't observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer. Bobby Seale

I like photographs which leave something to the imagination. Fay Godwin

I did spend a lot of time as a child very confused about whether I had a devil in me, or whether I was in a state of grace. I mean, these ideas are so potent to anybody with half an imagination. Antony Gormley

My parents are professors; they're intellectual. I spent a lot of time reading books. To me, everyone always looks like they do in your imagination. And in my imagination, the characters always looked like me. Shonda Rhimes

Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture. Ken Robinson

Most cocktails containing liquor are made today with gin and ingenuity. In brief, take an ample supply of the former and use your imagination. For the benefit of a minority, it is courteous to serve chilled fruit juice in addition to cocktails made with liquor. Irma S. Rombauer

There are casting directors with lots of imagination, but also some with not as much imagination. Max von Sydow

I think growing up on a farm in a certain amount of isolation, with not a lot of friends nearby, makes you entertain yourself and kind of grows your imagination - being alone is quite good for all that. You make up stories, talk to the animals, let them be an audience, a bunch of cows. Kristen Schaal

I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination? James Fenimore Cooper

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

Imagination is Reality Lite - a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work. Paul Bloom

There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would imagine because I think it's the body where the imagination lives somehow. I do feel the imagination isn't just in the brain up there. Michael Leunig

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. George Orwell

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination. Alfred North Whitehead

A lot of things that I write about have happened to people around me, if not necessarily to me or in the organizations I've worked in. Having said that, it's fiction and has a lot to do with my imagination and creativity. Ravi Subramanian

I've done a lot of bad things. Use your imagination. Katy Perry

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

If I am writing down something and it is my idea, my imagination, it won't be fact. Disha Patani

I've proven I'm courageous. I'm gutsier than anybody; I've got a better imagination than anybody; I'm essentially more creative than any other actor I know, and I've proven I take risks. I don't think I need to prove anything to myself any more. Michael Keaton

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination. Terry Brooks

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive. Bharati Mukherjee

I don't know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but we might be able to imagine it if your imagination were rich enough. Grace Lee Boggs

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth. Napoleon Hill

The imagination is man's power over nature. Wallace Stevens

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

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination. Sam Levenson

Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future. Mason Cooley

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

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

Imagination has a great deal to do with winning. Mike Krzyzewski

Reading a book, watching a movie, going to a play, it's transporting, and very, very exciting. And to be a part of that, creating things with your imagination, whoa. Steve Carell

I want to make my kind of films but make them work commercially, too. When my presentation meets the director's imagination, the result will be great. Vijay Sethupathi

I believe that imagination inspires nations. It's something that I live by. Janelle Monae

One thing about 'Star Wars' that I'm really proud of is that it expands the imagination. That's why I like the 'Star Wars' toys. George Lucas

I learned a long time ago that reality was much weirder than anyone's imagination. Hunter S. Thompson

It takes no imagination to live within your means. Francis Ford Coppola

I gather inspiration from all aspects of my life and things I see: love, heartache, mistakes, hopes, regrets, successes and faith. And it helps to have a wild imagination. Wendy Higgins

The best things that capture your imagination are ones you hadn't thought of before and that aren't talked about in the news all the time. Steve Wozniak

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory. Josh Billings

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

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. Mark Twain

Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. 'To find your subject, you must in some sense lose yourself along the way,' is Richard Holmes's version. Stacy Schiff

Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind's eye. That's an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition. Joshua Foer

There are no shortcuts in life - only those we imagine. Frank Leahy

I was always extremely creative. I was very artistic and never strong with numbers or science. I wanted to be an artist or a fashion designer. I wanted to be something that allowed for a lot of imagination. Whitney Wolfe

There's so much more that I want to do. Of course it's great what has happened so far: Ultra, Coachella, EDC. But still, production-wise and show-wise, I'd love to play a show at Madison Square Garden. Stuff like that is beyond my imagination. Martin Garrix

How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination. Nellie Bly

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching. Haruki Murakami

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

A man, to carry on a successful business, must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. A man can cultivate this faculty only by an appreciation of the finer things in life. Charles M. Schwab

I want to liberate my imagination and my mind with every kind of movie. That is what I wanted to do all my life. Alejandro Jodorowsky

We are all innovators, we all like to use our imagination, which is our greatest tool. Cory Booker

If you're not a daydreamer, you haven't got any imagination. David Cassidy

Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers. Deepak Chopra

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art. Clara Schumann

In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe. Pico Iyer

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination. Edmund Burke

'The Lord of the Rings,' published in the mid-1950s, was intended as a prehistory to our own world. It was perceived by Tolkien to be a small but significant episode in a vast alternate mythology constructed entirely out of his own imagination. Peter Jackson

People may think I'm trying something new by telling stories, but they're just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That's what I do. Steven Wright

Imagination rules the world. Napoleon Bonaparte

I love sci-fi because it leads in the imagination, and I always say it has the most intelligent fans in the world. Robert Carlyle

Classical plays require more imagination and more general training to be able to do. That's why I like playing Shakespeare better than anything else. Vivien Leigh

What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination. Jeffrey Katzenberg

Once you've got a child to the point that they've discovered books, they're safe. There's a world of the imagination that when they're hurt or upset, they can move into, and it is wonderful. John Rhys-Davies

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination. Billy Collins

It's not just that reporting gives you a bigger slice of life, gives - lends verisimilitude to what you are doing - it's that it feeds the imagination. Tom Wolfe

I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money. S. E. Hinton

I tend to be really spacey, but I don't think it's because I'm unintelligent - it's just my imagination and a little bit of ADD. Jenny Slate

'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. John le Carre

I think my printing to this day looks like the printing right out of a comic book. Actually, I always wanted to be in a comic book. I watched cartoons when I was a kid, too, and both comics and cartoons lit fire in my imagination. This realm holds a lot of interest for me, a lot of passion for me. So to be comic-ized, yeah, that's cool. Nathan Fillion

Sadly, semi-consciousness, along with daydreaming, is a capacity that is actively discouraged among children in schools, and our society is much poorer and harsher as a consequence. The value of liminal space and transitional imagination remain personally and culturally undeveloped. Michael Leunig

I think we're all a little afraid of the dark. If you lived in the country, as I did, there's nothing quite like country dark, which was really black. And as a child, your imagination runs wild. Malcolm McDowell

By no stretch of the imagination can you describe me as a Wall Street lawyer. If you're going to do that, you'd have to say that 7,500 people who work here in Southwestern Pennsylvania for the Bank of New York Mellon with good family jobs are Wall Streeters. Keith Rothfus

Ideas seem to come from everywhere - my life, everything I see, hear, and read, and most of all, from my imagination. I have a lot of imagination. Judy Blume

Imagination is the true magic carpet. Norman Vincent Peale

I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta. Pat Conroy

The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport. Van Morrison

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

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer. Charles Kettering

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

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life. Joshua Oppenheimer

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape. Jay S. Walker

I had a wild imagination as a kid - wild! - and I was outside all the time, swinging around in trees by myself. Matt Bomer

Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination. George Henry Lewes

Acting is an imaginative exercise. It would be odd if you didn't try to identify with the roles you play, but I think I can differentiate between where my imagination is leading me and where I actually am. John Hurt

I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. 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

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

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination. Ada Louise Huxtable

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination. Michael Leunig

Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave. Claude Bernard

There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way. Jane Campion

Live out of your imagination, not your history. Stephen Covey

This epidemic of student demands for 'safe places' to protect against threatening words and ideas would make a great science fiction film, but unbelievably, events seem to be outpacing the political imagination. Tom Tancredo

I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination; I'm very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I'm feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It's gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be. Steven Wright

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character. James Russell Lowell

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming. Francis Spufford

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea. Francis Bacon

I remember the fact that milk was delivered every day by a milkman. In summer, my mother would make what now seem in my middle-aged imagination the most delicious iced milkshakes. Simon McBurney

So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination. Michio Kaku

When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from. Neil Gaiman

Sometimes when you've got too much money you lose your imagination. Paloma Faith

I'm a light sleeper. I've never been one of those people who can put their head down and suddenly everything disappears. Nighttime is the time I get most scared, anxious or worried. In those darker moments before waking or sleeping is when I feel most, I don't know, I can turn on myself, and my imagination can take me dark places. Florence Welch

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

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination. Alan Watts

Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination. Evelyn Underhill

I'm a big fan of imagination. I think it's the strongest tool we have, and there are some things that you just can't practice. Rupert Friend

You know when you're a child and your imagination is limitless and you really believe in magic? I thought I had super powers. Michelle Phan

I think that people need an adrenalin rush. Folks need something aspirational; they need to do something that is hard. That's what ignites the imagination. Mae Jemison

Grandchildren have taught me how important the future is. I try to look through their eyes and envision what's in their imagination. What's the world going to look like when they're my age? That really does take a huge imagination. Richard Lugar

What's cool is when you're able to give your audience imagination and you don't have to cage them in like animals. Shia LaBeouf

You are indebted to you imagination for three-fourths of your importance. David Garrick

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in. Ben Okri

'The Outpost' is an exciting fantasy with a strong female lead that will capture the imagination of fans of both 'Game of Thrones' and 'Wonder Woman.' Dean Devlin

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living. Ishmael Beah

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. Marc Chagall

I think, for a long time, people thought I was a figment of Phil Spector's imagination because they knew The Crystals, they knew The Ronettes, they knew Bob B. Sox and the Blue Jeans, but had never had met Darlene Love. Darlene Love

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination. Arthur Conan Doyle

Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction. Jimi Hendrix

While the sciences are hugely important, let us not leave behind a child's imagination. Kevin Spacey

I don't want to discredit people's individuality, but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting. Kristen Stewart

Great ideas originate in the muscles. Thomas A. Edison

Ideas control the world. James A. Garfield

America gave the world the notion of the melting pot - an alchemical cooking device wherein diverse ethnic and religious groups voluntarily mix together, producing a new, American identity. And while critics may argue that the melting pot is a national myth, it has tenaciously informed the America's collective imagination. Ivan Krastev

The one thing about reality is sometimes it gives you material that is wilder than some of your wildest imagination could come up with. Doug Liman

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

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination. Wislawa Szymborska

Another side to me is this very sexual being. When I look back on my life, it's always been there. It's been there since I was 10 years old, having the imagination that I had. Janet Jackson

What is the real purpose behind the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? They seem like greater steps toward faith and imagination, each with a payoff. Like cognitive training exercises. Chuck Palahniuk

The American people want something terse, forcible, picturesque, striking - something that will arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy, arouse their indignation, stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, awaken their conscience. Joseph Pulitzer

Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination. Bob Kane

I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated. Terry Pratchett

Imagination! Imagination! I put it first years ago, when I was asked what qualities I thought necessary for success on the stage. Ellen Terry

Paris presents one incessant round of amusement & dissipation but very little, I believe - even for its inhabitants of that society - which interests the heart. Every day, you may see something new, magnificent & beautiful; every night, you may see a spectacle which astonishes & enchants the imagination. John Marshall

I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me. Orhan Pamuk

Imagination is a beast that has to be put in a cage. Timothy Spall

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. Plato

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. Carl Sagan

When I got large enough to go to work, while employed I was reflecting on many things that would present themselves to my imagination; and whenever an opportunity occurred of looking at a book, when the school-children were getting their lessons, I would find many things that the fertility of my own imagination had depicted to me before. Nat Turner

I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry. James Tate

I don't think that people should wear dresses two sizes too small. I just think that sexiness is better left to the imagination. It's just more tasteful. Rachel Zoe

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. Joseph Conrad

Cinema is a world of imagination. Marjane Satrapi

I have a vivid, apocalyptic imagination. Sally Mann

It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance. Baruch Spinoza