Quotes About Imagination

The way I define 'intelligent design' is that when people started out, we wanted to make sense of the world we lived in, so we created stories about how things worked.

Just once—and that was a long time ago, in a star system far, far away. This

I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.

Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them.

Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible inculcations of morality.

That's a poet.' 'I thought you said it was a bo-at.' 'Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?' 'Why, a thing to sail on the water in.' 'Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....' ... 'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.

I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

I hurried away to the white hall of Phantasy heedless of the innumerable forms of beauty that crowded my way: these might cross my eyes, but the unseen filled my brain.

To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.

It opened a little way, and a face came into the opening. It was Lona's. It's eyes were closed, but the face itself was upon me, and seemed to see me. It was as white as Eve's, white as Mara's, but did not shine like their faces. She spoke, and her voice was like a sleepy night-wind in the grass. Are you coming, king? it said. I cannot rest until you are with me, gliding down the river to the great sea, and the beautiful dream-land. The sleepiness is full of lovely things: come and see them.

All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words.

Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death, not life, it is weary of.

Then I remembered that night is the fairies' day, and the moon their sun; and I thought—Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different.

Just as you could form some idea of the nature of a man from the kind of house he built, if he followed his own taste, so you could, without seeing the fairies, tell what any one of them is like, by looking at the flower till you feel that you understand it.

Of all teachings that which presents a far distant God is the nearest to absurdity. Either there is none, or he is nearer to every one of us than our nearest consciousness of self. An unapproachable divinity is the veriest of monsters, the most horrible of human imaginations.

But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant! Not what he pleases, but what he can.

Now and then, when I look round on my books, they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their solid mass, and another world were about to break through.

The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.

But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose everyday life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning?

With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book.

Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us.

If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise.

The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. Everything of man must have been of God first; and it will help much towards our understanding of the imagination and its functions in man if we first succeed in regarding aright the imagination of God, in which the imagination of man lives and moves and has its being.