Quotes About Imagination

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from "Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While" to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn't nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

Painting is only a bridge linking the painter's mind with that of the viewer.

The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.

What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea -- possessing them -- that what has been said has still not been said enough.

La musique est la volupté de l'imagination.

How strange painting is, it delights us with representations of objects that are not pleasing in themselves! (15 September 1854)

O shameful philanthropists! O philosophers, without heart or imagination! Do you think that man is a machine like the rest of your machines? You deprive him of his most sacred rights on the pretext of saving him from work which you pretend to consider beneath his dignity, but which is, in fact, the very law of his existence (Monday 16 May 1853).

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture. (1 September 1859)

Dans la peinture, il s'établit comme un pont mystérieux entre l'âme des personnages et celle du spectateur.

A mere cast taken from nature will always be more real than the best copy a man can produce, for can anyone conceive that an artist's hand is not guided by his mind…his strange task will not be tinged with the colour of his spirit?...For the word realism to have any meaning all men would need to be of the same mind and to conceive things in the same way. For what is the supreme purpose of every form of art if it be not the effect? (22 February 1860)

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Once launched in the dizzy path of jealousy, lovers invariably give full sway to their imaginations and entertain the wildest ideas.

The day before yesterday, as I was calmly reading ... I saw a reduced vision of my son Yuri's face, but dead, in a horizontal position, his eyes closed.

Men of genius are made not by new ideas, but by an idea which possesses them, namely, that what has been said has not yet been sufficiently said.

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one nightSailed off in a wooden shoe—Sailed on a river of crystal lightInto a sea of dew.