Quotes About Imagination

As long as you can tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one, generating a boatload of ideas, even outlandish ones, can only be a good thing.

The next time you encounter such a barrier, imposed by people who lack your imagination and drive and creativity, think hard about ignoring it. Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.

So when it comes to solving problems, channeling your inner child can really pay off. It all starts with thinking small.

I hope when my kids have kids, there are still books around, and I don't really care if mine are around, but I hope there are books around because I love the idea of that. I love doing this. I love doing a podcast, but to me, a book is a thing that has no equal.

After all, just because you're at the office is no reason to stop thinking.

But when something is easy to imagine, it's often because you've failed to imagine it in sufficient detail.

Geniuses don't go mad," he said. "That's what people don't understand. They get out so far out that the water is like glass and they can see for miles and see so much, and in ways people have never seen before.

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.

We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus.

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple individuals in the space of a few years.

We conventionally associate dream inspiration with the creative arts, but the canon of scientific breakthroughs contains many revolutionary ideas that originated in dreams.

He drew maps in his head, looking for patterns, looking for clues.

let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind's cage-door… —KEATS

They were not hacks, working surreptitiously for Victorian special-interest groups. They were not blinded by politics or personal ambition. They were blinded, instead, by an idea.

The art of human invention has more than one muse.

All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines.

While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations of existing ideas in our heads, we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.

las ideas son como un trabajo de bricolaje: se construyen a partir de restos. Tomamos las que hemos heredado, o nos hemos encontrado por casualidad, y las reorganizamos dándoles nueva forma.

Oscar! You found it! Wow! A flying mitten! Oh, it's only a little bird. I wonder if he stole my mitten to make a snuggly nest. No, he's too small to carry off a mitten. But an eagle could do it! Maybe an eagle took my mitten to keep his baby's head warm.

Finding missing mittens is hard work. It would be easier to grow new ones! Let's try planting the other mitten right here in the garden. Next spring when the snow melts, a little mitten tree might sprout. Miss Seltzer and I would take good care of it all summer long. In the fall we'd pick the ripe mittens. Then I'd give mittens on Christmas. And mittens on birthdays. And mittens on Valentine's Day!

Oscar, it's getting dark and it's starting to rain. We'll never find that mitten! Come inside, Annie. I made some hot chocolate for us, and I've got a biscuit for Oscar. Look! The rain is melting the snowman. But what's that spot on his chest? Gracious! Your snowman has a heart ! My mitten is the heart of the snowman!

there's a difference between when this happens in an artist's studio or on the tennis court versus inside the barrel of a fifty-foot wave. When you tap into that much force while pushing the absolute limits of human performance, that's more than just an imaginative breakthrough—that's bending reality to your will.

Creativity has a brain wave signature as well: alpha waves pulsing out of the brain's right hemisphere.

Imagination," says futurist and philosopher Jason Silva, "allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.