Quotes About Imagination

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Reason is the natural order of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning.

You can make anything by writing.

You are never too old to dream a new dream or set another goal.

When the children on a holiday have already finished playing all the games before noon and now impatiently say, "is there no one who can think of a new game?," does this show then that these children are more developed and precocious than the children in the same or a previous generation who could make the familiar games last for the whole day? Or does it not rather show that these first children lack what I would call the endearing earnestness that belongs to play?

A sensitive spirit wounded by those who should have nurtured, sees all things in a false color, is proud of its own isolation, magnifies its defects, is unfitted for the intercourse of the world and as far as the necessities will allow retires within itself and imagines that all others are more fortunate, more deserving and more happy.

Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even though these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it's like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time.

A brain can hold anything, from giant things, like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can't see, like germs. A brain can even hold things that aren't and never were, like hobbits. A brain can hold the whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can't.

Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold anything, from giant things, like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can't see, like germs. A brain can even hold things that aren't and never were, like hobbits. A brain can hold the whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can't.

brain can hold anything, from giant things, like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can't see, like germs. A brain can even hold things that aren't and never were, like hobbits. A brain can hold the whole universe, a fist just holds what little it can grab. Or hits what it can't.

I realise how much time I used to spend with my head in a book, filling the emptiness of my world and letting the pages distract from the darkness in the shadows behind me.

Remembering dreams is like picking up small jellyfish—they slip through your fingers—and you never know if it's a dream you had or if you added to the dream in the remembering. Sometimes it's hard to know if you're remembering a dream at all, or just a dream about remembering a dream. And if that doesn't make sense, well, neither do dreams.

Books turn out to be pretty durable if they're kept away from damp and rats. They can last hundreds of years, easy. Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even thought these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it's like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time.

Everything to come was already in images: to find their soul, the ancients went into the desert. This is an image. The ancients lived their symbols, since the world had not yet become real for them. Thus they went into the solitude of the desert to teach us that the place of the soul is a lonely desert.

Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

Creative power is mightier than its possessor.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Notebooks: "It should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places in which Ã¢â'¬Â¦ you may find really marvelous ideas.

What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers...he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.

It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.

The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes. When reason is overvalued, the individual suffers a loss. Relying more on facts and rationality than on imagination and theory detracts from the quality of a person's intellectual life.

The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

There is a desert on the moon where the dreamer sinks so deeply into the ground that she reaches hell.