Quotes About Imagination

I had had a general sort of idea that the life I had behind me was a landscape in which I could wander as I pleased, gradually exploring its winding and its hidden valleys. No. I could repeat names and dates, just as a schoolboy can bring out a carefully learned lesson on a subject he knows nothing about. And at long intervals there arose worn, faded images, as abstract as those in my old French history: they stood out arbitrarily, against a white background.

When I was grown up I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the the rainbow nougats of the sunset. Against the night sky of New York, the neon signs appeared to me like giant sweatmeats

Let us beware lest our lack of imagination impoverish the future;

In all my games, my day-dreams, and my plans for the future I never changed myself into a man; all my imagination was devoted to the fulfilment of my destiny as a woman.

Let us beware lest our lack of imagination impoverish the future; the future is only an abstraction for us; each of us secretly laments the absence in it of what was; but tomorrow's humankind will live the future in its flesh and in its freedom; that future will be its present, and humankind will in turn prefer it;

La littérature apparaît lorsque quelque chose dans la vie se dérègle [...]

To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.

An imaginary divinity has been given to man so that he may strip himself of it.

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It is much more terrible than death, from death does not prevent the Beloved from having lived. That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.

Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist.

Cut away ruthlessly everything that is imaginary in your feelings.

Existence is not an end in itself but merely the framework upon which all good, both real and imagined, may be built.

I am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Repentance is suffused with faith; otherwise it is legal. But then without repentance, faith would be no more than imagination.

Love empowers the engine; law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology; it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.

Commandments are the railroad tracks on which the life empowered by the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit runs. Love empowers the engine; law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology; it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.

Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere—not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!

He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

Everyone laughed their heads off, which is not what literally happened but I like the idea of laughing heads becoming detached from bodies through extreme hilarity, so it is a good way to describe things.

The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.

Everyone laughed their heads off, which is not what literally happened but I like the idea of laughing heads becoming detached from bodies through extreme hilarity, so it was a good way to describe things.

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.

If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination.