Quotes About Imagination

What will you write with your pen of light?

Drama—formalized imitation, enacted upon a stage—is precisely behavior portraying behavior, but distilled ever closer to the essence. Literature takes that transmission one more difficult step, portraying action in the imagination of the writer and the reader, in the complete absence of both real actors and a material stage.

For the big lie, you first need the little lie. The little lie is, metaphorically speaking, the bait used by the Father of Lies to hook his victims. The human capacity for imagination makes us capable of dreaming up and creating alternative worlds. This is the ultimate source of our creativity. With that singular capacity, however, comes the counterpart, the opposite side of the coin: we can deceive ourselves and others into believing and acting as if things are other than we know they are.

what is terrible in actuality often pales in significance compared to what is terrible in imagination.

It is because our own experience is genuinely literary, narrative, embodied, and storylike that we are so attracted to fictional representations.

Movies, plays, operas, TV dramas—even the lyrics of songs—help us deal with our lived experiences, which are something different and broader than the mere material from which our experience hypothetically rises.

Aprende del pasado o revivirás sus horrores en tu imaginación durante toda la eternidad.

A creature that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can merely act out its nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot manifest in its behavior what the environment demands while doing so, it will simply die. But that is not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted representations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas of

The Land You Know, the Land You Do Not Know, and the Land You Cannot Even Imagine

How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five? —William Blake, from "A Memorable Fancy," The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

It is through such millennia-long exercise of the imagination that the idea of abstracted moral concepts themselves, with all they entail, developed.

Artists are the people who stand on the frontier of the transformation of the unknown into knowledge.

I have seen people define their utopia and then bend their lives into knots trying to make it reality. A left-leaning student adopts a trendy, anti-authority stance and spends the next twenty years working resentfully to topple the windmills of his imagination.

The human capacity for imagination makes us capable of dreaming up and creating alternative worlds. This is the ultimate source of our creativity. With that singular capacity, however, comes the counterpart, the opposite side of the coin: we can deceive ourselves and others into believing and acting as if things are other than we know they are.

But even what is terrible in actuality often pales in significance compared to what is terrible in imagination. And often what cannot be confronted because of its horror in imagination can in fact be confronted when reduced to its-still-admittedly-terrible actuality.

Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life.

Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about how we behave, when we don't know how it is we behave or even why.

I smelled the cinnamon, and I imagined myself full of white light. I think I felt something. Something more than the desire for a piece of toast—though that was there, too.

It's always been weird to imagine Jacob dating Crash, but now that Red was in the picture, maybe I could see it. We all have our types, and maybe Crash thrived best against a backdrop of self-righteousness.

That's the dirty little secret of advanced geometry. It may sound impressive that we can do geometry in ten dimensions (or a hundred, or a million...), but the mental pictures we keep in our mind are two-or at most three-dimensional. That's all our brains can handle. Fortunately, this impoverished vision is usually enough.

All mathematical writing is creative writing.

One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture

It was like seeing Bill Gates at age thirteen, times two. And half of him was wearing a cheerleader uniform. Yes, I know that's a weird image.

I tucked him in with his stuffed-animal pet dog—cleverly named Dog-Dog, by the way.