Quotes About Imagination

Genius is the activity which repairs the decay of things.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative man.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It

Each is liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts.

Turn the eye upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

An idea lights a thousand candles.

There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet.

As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.

Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.

Poets are thus liberating gods.

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

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine

The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.

I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw everything, why draw anything?

of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down...

In the words of a great writer, we find our own neglected thoughts.

As the eyes of Lyncæus were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession.

Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth.

We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.