Quotes About Imagination

You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.

All you need is a chair and a table and a typewriter and a bit of peace

We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness.

He went out of the compartment and returned a few moments later with a small spirit stove and a pair of curling tongs. "I use them for the moustaches," he said, referring to the latter.

He never left the cinema very quickly. It always took him a moment or two to return to the prosaic reality of everyday life.

Oh, I leave it to your imagination, Mr. Latimer. I would not presume to give you advice, you know. The advice of such elderly fogeys as myself is invariably treated with scorn. Rightly so, perhaps, who knows? But we old buffers like to think that experience has taught us something. We have noticed a good deal, you know, in the course of a lifetime." A

Imagination is a good servant and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

But why? What earthly benefit can accrue from such a crime—even in the most diseased imagination?

Kathrine had seldom had that useful thing, a 'day off'. 'But in a way, being tied physically gives you lots of scope mentally. You're always free to think.

The girl started. 'I—I don't know. I shall never forget it. I dream of it.

I wonder," I said. "I think each one of us in his secret heart fancies himself as Sherlock Holmes.

the perfection of a filing system beside which all other filing systems should sink into oblivion. She dreamed of such a system at night.

It is to show you that it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees….

People with nothing better to do and a bit weak in the top storey sit down and write 'em. They don't mean any harm! Just a kind of excitement.

The true work, it is done from within. The little grey cells—remember always the little grey cells, mon ami." -- Hercule Poirot

I can always think of things," said Mrs. Oliver happily. "What is so tiring is writing them down. I always think I've finished, and then when I count up I find I've only written thirty thousand words instead of sixty thousand, and so then I have to throw in another murder and get the heroine kidnapped again. It's all very boring.

My theory is the truth," said Poirot quietly. "And the truth is necessarily correct. In your theory you made a fundamental error. You permitted your imagination to lead you astray with midnight assignations and passionate love scenes. But in investigating crime we must take our stand upon the commonplace.

One wonders where these things come *from* -- I mean the ones that are a must. Sometimes I think that is the moment one feels nearest to God, because you have been allowed to feel a little of the joy of pure creation. You have been able to make something that is not yourself. You know a kinship with the Almighty, as you might on a seventh day, when you see that what you have made is good.

Lawrence lived in the midst of an artistic disarray that would have driven me quite mad.

It looks like a hand," he remarked. "But, if you say so, I'm quite prepared to admit that it's a cubist picture of Sunset at the North Pole.

Subdue your melodramatic fancies", said Tommy.

It's a very useful thing sometimes, an idea.

I saw," said Poirot. "With the eyes of the mind one can see more than with the eyes of the body. One leans back and closes the eyes—

But you know, my dear," said Poirot gently, "people are never like what you remember them. You make them as the years go by, more and more the way you wish them to be, and as you think you remember them. If you want to remember them as agreeable and gay and handsome, you make than far more so than they actually were.