Quotes About Imagination

If you grow up in a household where there are books, where you are read to, where parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins read for their own pleasure, naturally you learn to read. If no one close to you takes joy in reading, where is the evidence that it's worth the effort?

We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of impulses through the neutrons in our brain is about the same as the speed of a donkey cart.

The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom.

if we have several hundred or several thousand cultures, each with its own cosmology, we should not be astounded if, every now and then, purely by chance, one of them proposes an idea that is not only correct but also impossible for them to have deduced.

In our time we have less severe standards. We tell children about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy for reasons we think emotionally sound, but then disabuse them of these myths before they're grown. Why retract? Because their well-being as adults depends on them knowing the world as it really is. We worry, and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Claus.

How can you tell when someone is only imagining?

Let's see if I got this right, she would say to herself. I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.

She was determined to be as tough-minded as possible, without abandoning the sense of wonder that was driving her in the first place.

God pity a one-dream man.

Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent.

If we scrutinize 100,000 pictures, it's not surprising that occasionally we'll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy, it would be amazing if we couldn't find one here and there.

Mašta ?e nas ?esto odvoditi do svjetova kojih nikada nije bilo. Ali bez nje nikamo ne bismo stigli. Sumnja nam omogu?uje da razlu?imo maštu od ?injenica, da provjerimo naša razmišljanja.

The Somnium makes clear to us, although it did not to all of Kepler's contemporaries, that "in a dream one must be allowed the liberty of imagining occasionally that which never existed in the world of sense perception." Science fiction was a new idea at the time of the Thirty Years' War, and Kepler's book was used as evidence that his mother was a witch.

It's hard to imagine an American sports team named the Diarrheas ("Gimme a 'D' …").

the pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none. We assemble disconnected patches of light and dark and unconsciously try to see a face. The Man in the Moon is one result. Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup describes another. There are many other examples.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

There is a place with four suns in the sky-red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth-and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it

If the aliens would only keep all the folks they abduct, our world would be a little saner.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. Skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. The Cosmos is rich beyond measure—in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe.

in a dream one must be allowed the liberty of imagining occasionally that which never existed in the world of sense perception.

When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

It is therefore impossible that reason not previously instructed should imagine anything other than that the Earth is a kind of vast house with the vault of the sky placed on top of it;