Best Quotes About Imagination (Top 100)
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I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein
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Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso
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Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Albert Einstein
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They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Edgar Allan Poe
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All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso
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Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!
Dr. Seuss
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You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
Jack London
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You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain
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All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe
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Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
John Lennon
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Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
Jessamyn West
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Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
Carl Sagan
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Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.
Albert Einstein
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Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
Victor Hugo
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The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
Helen Keller
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Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Gloria Steinem
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I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.
John Keats
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It takes a very long time to become young.
Pablo Picasso
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
Dr. Seuss
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Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Albert Einstein
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Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
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It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
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Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.
Marcel Proust
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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
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There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
Victor Hugo
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Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.
Jim Henson
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The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.
William Blake
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Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde
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Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
Albert Einstein
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Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
Henry Miller
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This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
Henry David Thoreau
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I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.
Albert Einstein
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If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
Albert Einstein
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When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.
Albert Einstein
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The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
William Shakespeare
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I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.
Zelda Fitzgerald
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My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
John Keats
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The power of imagination makes us infinite.
John Muir
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Laughter is timeless. Imagination has no age. And dreams are forever.
Walt Disney
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Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better.
Sidney Sheldon
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The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.
Jules Verne
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Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
Jacques Derrida
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The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
Albert Einstein
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For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
Jean Dubuffet
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People can die of mere imagination.
Geoffrey Chaucer
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As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood.
Jim Henson
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A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The man who has no imagination has no wings.
Muhammad Ali
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Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
Ian Mcewan
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America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
Harry S. Truman
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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
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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
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An idea is salvation by imagination.
Frank Lloyd Wright
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Nothing happens unless first we dream.
Carl Sandburg
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...If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)
Malcolm Gladwell
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To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
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You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood...
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
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A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
William Faulkner
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I think that the most necessary quality for any person to have is imagination. It makes people able to put themselves in other people's places. It makes them kind and sympathetic and understanding.
Jean Webster
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Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
William James
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Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw
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I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Adam Savage
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All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac
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I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
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To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
Anatole France
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The secret message communicated to most young people today by the society around them is that they are not needed, that the society will run itself quite nicely until they - at some distant point in the future - will take over the reigns. Yet the fact is that the society is not running itself nicely... because the rest of us need all the energy, brains, imagination and talent that young people can bring to bear down on our difficulties. For society to attempt to solve its desperate problems without the full participation of even very young people is imbecile.
Alvin Toffler
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Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey
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Few people have the imagination for reality.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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I can't think of anything more rewarding than being able to express yourself to others through painting. Exercising the imagination, experimenting with talents, being creative; these things, to me, are truly the windows to your soul.
Bob Ross
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I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it."
Albert Einstein
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I can believe anything provided it is incredible.
Oscar Wilde
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Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard
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To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
Aldo Leopold
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If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.
William Arthur Ward
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Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.
Anthony Burgess
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The imagination needs moodling,—long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland
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There is a space between man's imagination and man's attainment that may only be traversed by his longing
Kahlil Gibran
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There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality.
Jonas Salk
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Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?
Leonardo da Vinci
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He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
Henry James
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Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton
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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
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If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.
Jesse Jackson
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Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.
Colin Wilson
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Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.
Thomas Harris
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A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
Michelangelo
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The imagination is precious. Don't lose it. Don't lose the child in you.
Marilyn Manson
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Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality.Don't put limitations on yourself.Others will do that for you.
James Cameron
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Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
Simone Weil
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Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.
Louis Aragon
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I have found that— just as in real life—imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.
Steve Martin
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How potent is the fancy! People are so impressionable, they can die of imagination.
Geoffrey Chaucer
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The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probalities.
Jane Roberts
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Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.
Bill Hicks
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To read great books does not mean one becomes "ツ話ookish'; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.
John Cowper Powys
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A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.
Catherine the Great
Even More Imagination Quotes
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My love is my soul's imagination... how do I love you... imagine.
Saul Williams
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Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking tartar sauce with you.
Zig Ziglar
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We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.
Judy Garland
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Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one.
John Lennon
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Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.
Northrop Frye
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Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.
Irving Howe
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Go to where the silence is and say something.
Amy Goodman
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The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.
William Blake
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There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.
Edward de Bono
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Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Marianne Moore
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We suffer more in imagination than in reality.
Seneca the Younger
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Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.
Les Brown
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Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W. Somerset Maugham
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Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
William Blake
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The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Derek Walcott
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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
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Imagination is a gift given to us from God and each one of us use it differently.
Brian Jacques
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Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...'; And then do it.
Duane Michals
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If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.
Mary Daly
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When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.
Algernon Blackwood
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The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.
Adam Smith
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Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.
Franklin P. Adams
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The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
James A. Michener
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What God intended for you goes far beyond anything you can imagine.
Oprah Winfrey
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Why, when you have a mental disease, is it always considered an act of imagination? Why is it that every organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?
Ruby Wax
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We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.
Thomas Merton
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The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
Carson McCullers
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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
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
Wallace Stevens
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What you contemplate, you touch. What you enter into in imagination, you make yourself one with.
Dion Fortune
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... people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
Joe Hill
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He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
Joseph Joubert
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You have a curious way of arousing one's imagination, stimulating all one's nerves, and making one's pulses beat faster. You put an aureole on vice, provided only if it is honest. Your ideal is a daring courtesan of genius. Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a woman to her very last fiber.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
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Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.
Eric Temple Bell
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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
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All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others.
Cher
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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
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All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!
Saul Bellow
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The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
Albert Einstein
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When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.
Emile Coue
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Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless.
Jamie Paolinetti
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Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
Vincent Van Gogh
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Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
Jules de Gaultier
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Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.
Christopher Isherwood
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Beauty is found in anything that delights the senses, nourishes the soul, fires the imagination.
Thomas Kinkade
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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
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Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
Bertrand Russell
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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
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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
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The more you know, the more you can create. There's no end to imagination in the kitchen.
Julia Child
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No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.
Brenda Ueland
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Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.
Jonas Salk
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I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum
George Bernard Shaw
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There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so.
Mary Daly
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It is the childlike part of us that produces works of the imagination. When we were children time passed so slow with us that we seemed to have time for everything.
William Morris
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We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.
Jean Toomer
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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
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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
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Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
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We all live best in our imaginations.
Brad Meltzer
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Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.
Jimi Hendrix
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If for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.
Richard Hofstadter
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Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.
Camille Paglia
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As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.
Mervyn Peake
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I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge - myth is more potent than history - dreams are more powerful than facts - hope always triumphs over experience - laughter is the cure for grief - love is stronger than death
Robert Fulghum
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Ordinary people believe only in the possible. Extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible, they begin to see it as possible.
Cherie Carter-Scott
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If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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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
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Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.
Helen Rowland
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Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.
Luigi Pirandello
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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
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Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on a significant bases of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.
August Strindberg
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Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.
Jim Jarmusch
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Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love.
Gilbert Parker
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Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination than only writing about what you know
John Gardner
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Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.
Rod Serling
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People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom, or their lack of imagination
Sydney Smith
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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 Buñuel
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It's always more intriguing to imagine what's happening, as opposed to seeing everything, because then you can use your imagination. I always wanted to be at a distance.
Sofia Coppola
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The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.
Johan Huizinga
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The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing.
Publilius Syrus
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The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
Northrop Frye
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In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Larry Niven
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It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
Lewis Carroll
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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
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Imagination is the true magic carpet.
Norman Vincent Peale
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Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.
Louis Aragon
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The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination.
Julian Simon
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Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.
Camille Paglia
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Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Steve Jobs
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Imagination is the eye of the soul.
Joseph Joubert
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It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.
Damien Hirst
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The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
Charles Horton Cooley
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The machine will grind you down, but the machine is not bigger than the imagination. Rome fell in a day. We know this.
Suheir Hammad
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It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.
Paul Gauguin
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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
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For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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There are two worlds: the world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.
Leigh Hunt
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Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made
Bruce Catton
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People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
William Butler Yeats
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Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.
Eric Ries
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The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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If I place love above everything, it is because for me it is the most desperate, the most despairing state of affairs imaginable.
Andre Breton
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Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit
Doris Day
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What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?
Woody Allen
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The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Toni Morrison
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Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.
Susan Ertz
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There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.
Edith Wharton
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The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?
Carson McCullers
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They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
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Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
Philip Roth
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Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
Ernest Hemingway
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The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you
Barry Lopez
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Since childhood I'd been suspected of imagination
Steve Aylett
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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
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The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.
Michael Foley
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An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.
Eduard Hanslick
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Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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There are no shortcuts in life - only those we imagine.
Frank Leahy
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Only in your imagination can you revise.
Fay Wray
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Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?
Anita Shreve
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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
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Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.
Lord Dunsany
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I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.
Duane Michals
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To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination
Cynthia Ozick
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Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
Cesare Pavese
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The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.
Alexander Cockburn
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All that you can imagine you already know.
Stephen Spender
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You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'
George Bernard Shaw
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Imagination creates reality.
Richard Wagner
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A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.
Russell Page
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Even the wildest dreams have to start somewhere. Allow yourself the time and space to let your mind wander and your imagination fly.
Oprah Winfrey
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Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.
Frederick Henry Hedge
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Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
Edward Abbey
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I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.
Lord Dunsany
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We have all lost our possessions and many of us our homes," he said. "But these losses, severe though they may seem, remind us of what no person can take, and that is our minds and our imaginations.
Lloyd Jones
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To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.
George Jean Nathan
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If you believe, then you hang on. If you believe, it means you've got imagination, you don't need stuff thrown out on a blueprint, and don't face facts-what can stop you? If I don't make it today, I'll come in tomorrow.
Ruth Gordon
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Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.
Eduard Hanslick
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By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.
Dorothea Brande
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick
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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
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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
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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
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Imagination rules the world.
Napoleon Bonaparte
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The imagination made us human, but being human, becoming more human, is a greater burden than we imagined. We have no choice but to imagine ourselves more human than we are.
Wright Morris
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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
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Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive
Howard Thurman
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There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.
Josh Billings
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The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience.
Joe Haldeman
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
George Santayana
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It was the year Frankie thought about the world. And she did not see it as a round school globe, with the countries neat and different-colored. She thought of the world as huge and cracked and looseand turning a thousand miles an hour.
Carson McCullers
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To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
Anatole France
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A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination.
Arthur Wing Pinero
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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
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Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
E. e. cummings
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Wit penetrates; humor envelops. Wit is a function of verbal intelligence; humor is imagination operating on good nature.
Peggy Noonan
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The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.
Frank Barron
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Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Upgrading one's imagination about what is possible is always a leap of faith.
Clay Shirky
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It takes as much imagination to create debt as to create income.
Leonard Orr
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Everybody in their own imagination decides what scary is.
Yvonne Craig
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Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Albert Einstein
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Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
James Russell Lowell
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Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
Annie Dillard
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It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.
Annie Dillard
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The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one.
Oscar Wilde
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The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Samuel Johnson
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The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of âadaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.
Anthony Storr
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People who love only once in their lives are. . . shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
Oscar Wilde
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The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.
Elizabeth Drew
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Imagination frames events unknown, In wild, fantastic shapes of hideous ruin, And what it fears creates.
Hannah More
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When I'm judging a theory, I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way.
Albert Einstein
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It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
Henry David Thoreau
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We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.
William Hazlitt
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Doubts and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.
Helen Keller
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The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
Jessamyn West
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The power of imagination created the illusion that my vision went much farther than the naked eye could actually see.
Nelson Mandela
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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.
Nadine Gordimer
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To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery —even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness —is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.
Andre Breton
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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 Connelly
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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
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How many feasible projects have miscarried through despondency, and been strangled in their birth by a cowardly imagination.
Jeremy Collier
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The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for it.
John Galsworthy
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Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
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Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
Ernest Hemingway
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Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.
Havelock Ellis
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Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.
Jean Baudrillard
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Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
C.S. Lewis
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Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match.
Ingrid Bengis
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Imagination! Imagination! I put it first years ago, when I was asked what qualities I thought necessary for success on the stage.
Ellen Terry
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It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
Cesare Pavese
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Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Little men with little minds and little imaginations go through life in little ruts, smugly resisting all changes which would jar their little worlds.
Zig Ziglar
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Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.
Maxwell Maltz
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The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
John Ruskin
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When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
Mark Twain
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Imagination took the reins, and reason, slow-paced, though sure-footed, was unequal to a race with so eccentric and flighty a companion.
Fanny Burney
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When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.
Ellen Key
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Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future
Charles F. Kettering
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Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.
Christina Stead
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I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
Albert Einstein
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A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self- interest, you can have practically anything you go after.
Napoleon Hill
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The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.
George Meredith
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The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
John Keats
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Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Henry Louis Mencken
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The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
Albert Einstein