Quotes About Imagination

What skilful limner e'er would choose To paint the rainbow's varying hues, Unless to mortal it were given To dip his brush in dyes of heaven?

Nothing imaginative ever happens to five people at once, because each is up to only one-fifth of his personal intelligence and perception. A crowd is never equal to the intelligence of any one of its members.

Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world — Los Angeles in the '50s — they made perfect sense.

In this place you can become the person you want to be. Anything can be gotten from books. In books there are rooms of gold, in books there is jadelike beauty.

Just asking Why and What If will not necessarily cause these neural connections to occur—but questioning can help nourish the trees and extend the reach of those branches.

Always the beautiful answer Who asks a more beautiful question. —E.E. Cummings

The designer George Lois, who claims some of his best ideas have come while meandering through the Metropolitan Museum, says, "Museums are the custodians of epiphanies.")

we all live in the world our questions create.

That's because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what's possible now?

We've seen that companies sometimes use a hypothetical What If question to temporarily remove constraints that can inhibit ambitious thinking (What if cost weren't an issue—how might we do things differently?), and the same principle applies when people are pursuing new ideas or embarking on change in their lives. Often the biggest constraint is fear of failure.

But if we can't compete with technology when it comes to storing answers, questioning—that uniquely human capacity—is our ace in the hole. Until Watson acquires the equivalent of human curiosity, creativity, divergent thinking skills, imagination, and judgment, it will not be able to formulate the kind of original, counterintuitive, and unpredictable questions an innovative thinker—or even just your average four-year-old—can come up with.

Epiphanies often are characterized as "Aha! moments," but that suggests the problem has been solved in a flash. More often, insights arrive as What if moments—bright possibilities that are untested and open to question.)

Exploring What If possibilities is a wide-open, fun stage of questioning and should not be rushed.

If you can't imagine you could be wrong, what's the point of democracy? And if you can't imagine how or why others think differently, then how could you tolerate democracy?" As

In order for imagination to flourish,37 there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or perspective.

Yet chances are, for the rest of her life, that four-year-old girl will never again ask questions as instinctively, as imaginatively, or as freely as she does at that shining moment. Unless she is exceptional, that age is her questioning peak.

The What If stage is the blue-sky moment of questioning, when anything is possible. Those possibilities may not survive the more practical How stage; but it's critical to innovation that there be a time for wild, improbable ideas to surface and to inspire.

Picasso was onto this truth fifty years ago when he commented, "Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.

I've always been very concerned with democracy. If you can't imagine you could be wrong, what's the point of democracy? And if you can't imagine how or why others think differently, then how could you tolerate democracy?

This works well under most circumstances, but when we wish to move beyond that default setting—to consider new ideas and possibilities, to break from habitual thinking and expand upon our existing knowledge—it helps if we can let go of what we know, just temporarily.

We arrive at originality because the dendrites have reached out and made contact with the branches of faraway "trees," thereby enabling us to combine thoughts, bits of knowledge, and influences that normally do not mix.

If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?

Writing comics? Still the best job in the world. I sit around all day making shit up and see it illustrated, in 99% of cases, exactly as I imagined it -- if not better. I've been doing this a long time now, and I'm going to do it until I die. Which probably won't be long, given the constant insane deadline pressure.

Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject.... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.