Quotes About Imagination

The most successful scientist thinks like a poet—wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical—and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees.

To express this increasingly complex subject as succinctly as possible, the ancestors of our species developed the brain power to connect with other minds and to conceive unlimited time, distance, and potential outcomes. This infinite reach of imagination, put quite simply, is what made us great.

Someone has defined insanity as an inability to choose among false alternatives. In dreams we are insane. We wander across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen.

Thinking about thinking is the core process of the creative arts, but it tells us very little about how we think the way we do, and nothing of why the creative arts originated in the first place.

What happened, what we think happened, in distant memory, is built around a small collection of dominating images. In one of my own from the age of seven, I stand in the shallows off Paradise Beach, staring down at a huge jellyfish in water so still and clear that its every detail is revealed as though it were trapped in glass. The creature is astonishing. It existed outside my previous imagination.

ALMOST ALL MY LIFE I HAVE DREAMED OF THE TROPICS. MY fantasies drifted far beyond the benign temperate zone of Thoreau and Muir.

The early stages of a creative thought, the ones that count, do not arise from jigsaw puzzles of specialization. The most successful scientist thinks like a poet—wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical—and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees.

Writers of Earth-invader science fiction, please remember to provide all your aliens with soft grasping hands or tentacles or some other fleshy fat appendages.)

The unknown and prodigious are drugs to the scientific imagination, stirring insatiable hunger with a single taste.

The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve.

The wonderful thing about writers like [James] Baldwin is the way we read them and come across passages that are so arresting we become breathless and have to raise our eyes from the page to keep from being spirited away.

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.

In my opinion the best writer of historical novels. He makes you feel, smell, see every thing he describes in all his books. He doesn't only write, he makes you linked images in your mind with his words.

I know they're not actually talking but the books on my desk seem to whisper "Drop what you're doing! Set aside your poetry! Open us, read us! Read slowly while you're at it. Always read us - every day - before you play.

If with water you fill up your glasses You'll never write anything wise But wine is the horse of Parnassus That carries a bard to the skies.

In my rather brief medical practice,' said David modestly, 'I found that people spend their whole lives imagining they are about to die. Their only consolation is that one day they're right.

Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.

You know...that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at. The wall of a museum -- a canvas -- a piece of film -- or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something -- that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you.

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper. the photographer begins with the finished product

Imagination is the vehicle for the soul.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.

Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection . . .

When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision.