Quotes About Imagination

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the rooftop. It is just me thinking about being you. And before I headed back down the hill, I walked in a circle around your house, making an invisible line which you would have to cross before dark.

I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.

one burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.

You have to see it to be it.

You can linger too long in your dreams...

If God exists, not seeking God must be the gravest error imaginable. If one decides to sincerely seek for God and doesn't find God, the lost effort is negligible in comparison to what is at risk in not seeking God in the first place.

Our imagination so magnifies the present, because we are continually thinking about it, and so reduces eternity, because we do not think about it, that we turn eternity into nothing and nothing into eternity, and all this is so strongly rooted within us that all our reason cannot save us from it.

Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God.

Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.

Wisdom is a return to childhood.

Reason never wholly overcomes imagination, while the contrary is quite common.

Nous ne nous contentons pas de la vie que nous avons en nous et en notre propre être. Nous voulons vivre dans l'idée des autres d'une vie imaginaire, et nous nous efforçons pour cela de paraître

I can certainly imagine a man without hands, feet, or head, for it is only experience that teaches us that the head is more necessary than the feet. But I cannot imagine a man without thought; he would be a stone or an animal.

People often mistake their imagination for their heart, & so often are convinced they are converted as soon as they start thinking of becoming converted.

Put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be: if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.

Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world's supreme good.

One says, It is two hours ago; the other says, It is only three-quarters of an hour. I look at my watch, and say to the one, You are weary, and to the other, Time gallops with you; for it is only an hour and a half ago, and I laugh at those who tell me that time goes slowly with me, and that I judge by imagination. They do not know that I judge by my watch.

De verbeelding kan dwazen niets wijs maken, maar ze maakt hen gelukkig.

Reading is a tool no one can take away. A million bad things may happen in life and it'll still be with you, like a flashlight that never needs a battary. Reading can offer a crack of light on the blackest of nights.

Inside this building, the world had felt generous, limitless, like a safe spot for dreams to grow.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands