Quotes About Imagination

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his masterwork, Creativity.

Guilford also realized that divergent thinking wasn't entirely free wheeling: It had four core characteristics. Fluency, the ability to produce a great number of ideas in a short time-frame; flexibility, the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles; originality, the ability to produce novel ideas; elaboration, the ability to organize those ideas and execute on them.

Our limits are governed by flow's ability to amplify performance as much as by imagination's ability to dream up that performance.

The quality most desirable in a CEO? According to a global survey conducted by IBM of 1,500 top executives in sixty countries: creativity.

creativity triggers flow; then flow enhances creativity.

This is the night of revelation. This is the night the dolls wake. This is the night of the dreamer in the attic. This is the night of the piper in the woods.

Let no one tell me that childhood is lived in a timeless present. Rather it is a fever of futures, an ardor of perpetual anticipations.

Was there then something wrong with him, that he couldn't just rest content? Must he always be dreaming up improvements? And it seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest awhile.

Chavannes's gigantic mural Inter artes et naturam (Between Art and Nature)

the comfort of the infinite and never lost his taste for the poetic

Like the illustrated books of his childhood, he grafted words to images and images to words, insistently reshaping both to his narrative of reassurance. He paired pictures with poetry, sometimes transcribing lines from literature and scripture directly onto his prints to create collages of consolation. This process of layering words and images so gratified his manic imagination and his search for comfort that it would become his principal way of seeing and coping with the world.

Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person's mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.

The application of reason revealed that reports of miracles were dubious, that the authors of holy books were all too human, that natural events unfolded with no regard to human welfare, and that different cultures believed in mutually incompatible deities, none of them less likely than the others to be products of the imagination. (As Montesquieu wrote, "If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.")

human material existence is limited by ideas, not by stuff.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking.

John Dryden wrote that a work of fiction is "a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.

The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you're pretending to communicate.

Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators.

Imagine the tragedy; then try to imagine it another million times. That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

If people are mentally agile enough to interpret events in many ways, what's to prevent a child from interpreting the meaning of to nail as "to obscure a surface by nailing things to it," or to coil as "to cause a long object to have a filament coiled around it"?

A lot follows from the idea that the mind is a metaphor-monger.

Human sacrifice and witch-burnings are just two examples of the harm that can result from people pursuing ends that involve figments of their imagination.

Intuitive probability is driven by imaginability: the easier something is to visualize, the likelier it seems. This entraps us into what Tversky and Kahneman call the conjunction fallacy, in which a conjunction is more intuitively probable than either of its elements.