Quotes About Imagination

Washington Irving

It was here I usually retired to banquet on my novels

He was himself a great reader of old legends and romances, and often lamented that he could not believe in them; for a superstitious person, he thought, must live in a kind of fairyland.

Washington Irving

Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the sex, as by their own imaginations. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.

fairy realms of antiquity. Like a landscape melting into distance, they receive a thousand charms from their very obscurity, and the fancy delights to fill up their outlines with graces and excellences of its own creation. Thus

There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.

after a man passes 60 , his mischief is mainly in his head

The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.

lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to "walk about" into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?

The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.

to stand in front of some of his drawings or pictures gives a keener and more spiritual pleasure than any other kind of painting.

I need his dreams. Life isn't life without them. And if he can give me the dreams, I think I can hold the rest together.

With out art, without communicating, we wouldn't live beyond 30 because we'd be so sad and depressed.

the world could be wonderfully exotic when viewed through the bottom of a cocktail glass.

If you had the mental energy in the tank, you could create in an instant.

All comparison is based on memory, and memory is an image based on engrams. It follows that all judgement, evaluation, is an interpretation of images, for even the present is already a memory by the time we have seized it. Therefore the unending process of finding things "good" or "not so good" is a work of imagination. Would in not be futile indeed to suppose that such judgments, that is any and all judgments, could have any absolute existence or value?

If you constantly compare this moment with some perfection that you imagined, you are fated to be forever disappointed. Adventure is the unforeseen, not the expected." Blithe

Just because we haven't seen a dragon, doesn't mean dragons don't exist." Louise stated the logic of why the scientists were reluctant to commit to a theory.

A painting is more than the sum of the parts," he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you've got magic.

Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known.

Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.