Quotes About Imagination

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)

Man is a being born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.

Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.

Books are companions even if you don't open them.

When I want to read a book, I write one.

I have sometimes half believed, although the suspicion is mortifying, that there is only one step between his state who deeply indulges in imaginative meditation, and insanity.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.

When I want to read a good book I write one.

To cease to think creatively is to cease to live

I am captivated more by dreams of the future then history of the past.

In the 1770s, when he was in Paris, Benjamin Franklin witnessed the flight of one of the first hot-air balloons. As the balloon soared into the air, someone asked Franklin: "What good is it?" Franklin responded: "What good is a new-born baby?

persuaded, therefore, that ere long some ingenious

retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken.

element that makes the record real and brings the story

The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things, fight the greatest battles, or be distinguished by the most brilliant personal heroism, yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed. The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.

Reality is what one makes it. And the more negative reality one nurtures and creates, the more of it one has.

A well-frog cannot imagine the ocean, nor can a summer insect conceive of ice. How then can a scholar understand the Tao? He is restricted by his own learning.

the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given even as an object of cognition or imagination and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known.

Before i launch into a discussion of what a nerd is and where the idea of nerds comes from, I'd like to diclose that when i was eleven, I had a rich fantasy life in which I carried a glowing staff.

Someone once told him the scariest part of any story was when a character crept forward to investigate a strange sound. Whatever nightmare waited around the corner did not matter, its revelation almost always a disappointment. It was the imagined threat that mattered most.

I would encourage subtlety. Nabokov's bubble gum or Munro's water over Dumbo's magic feather.

Maybe Virginia Woolf thought about going to the lighthouse, but I doubt she ever got there, or the novel might have ended differently.

Don't forget the most basic reason we read: to discover what happens next. Make certain your devotion to pretty sentences and flesh-and-blood characters and cityscapes and exquisitely crafted metaphors works in service of story, contributing to the momentum that will propel your readers forward.