Quotes About Imagination

Hoot, Johnie Rousseau mon, what for hae ye sae mony figmangairies? You're a bonny man indeed to mauk siccan a wark; set ye up. Canna ye just live like ither fowk?

All the same, Abelard opened the mind of the Middle Ages in new and startling ways. He gave the name of Aristotle and Aristotle's logic an edgy glamour it never entirely lost. Aristotle had said: All men desire to know. Abelard now added: All men need to question and doubt in order to know. These were important signposts for the future. For now, medieval civilization was about to swing down another path, one emblazoned by the Neoplatonist imagination.

As David Hume explained, "The mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions, proceeding from the unhappy situation of private or public affairs, from ill health, from a gloomy and melancholy disposition. In such a state of mind, where real objects of terror are wanting, the soul … finds imaginary ones, to whose power and malevolence it sets no limits.

Just as a picture should provide the spectator with a new view of his world, so should a building.

For Adam Smith, our moral life, as well as our cultural life, is a matter of imagination. The richer the inventory of objects for its diversion, and the deeper our own fellow feeling, the happier we become, but also the more we can perceive happiness in others.

The rich man is the man with the most fertile imagination, in other words; his eyes really are bigger than his stomach.

We'd be working in our motel room through the night, and I'd come up with an idea at two in the morning, and he'd start jumping up and down, pacing across the room, or whatever.

De hoop van de ouden vergaat in rook zodat hun jongen wolken hebben om hun eigen luchtkastelen op te bouwen.

Het heeft weinig zin te blijven studeren op een plattegrond die je zelf hebt getekend.

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.

Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.

Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.

It is all nonsense, to be sure and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis.

He hugged the thought that a great part of what he had invented was in the true sense of the word occult: page after page might have been read aloud to the uninitiated without betraying the inner meaning.

To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.

He could even talk about painting, and that's more than can be said of most painters.

I have been grinding away at facts for thirty years; it is time for fancies.

Perhaps he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before its descent ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed very far, all the long way from the known to the unknown.

A great thing he could never do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine sincere and genuine pages.

I dream in fire but work in clay.

And there were other rocks that were like animals, creeping, horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like words I could not say, and others like dead people lying on the grass. I went on among them, though they frightened me, and my heart was full of wicked song they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist myself about the way they did, and I went on and on a long way till at last I liked the rocks and they didn't frighten me any more

all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes.

By what seemed then and still seems a chance, the suggestion of a moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of light, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath.