Quotes About Imagination

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

The image of the world is half the world.

A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: "You ought", or: "This is the truth." It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions. If a person has a nightmare, it means either that he is too much given to fear, or else that he is too exempt from it;

A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end, but the same is not true of a dream. Its dimensions in time and space are quite different; to understand it you must examine it from every aspect-just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and turn it over and over until you are familiar with every detail of its shape.

School came to bore me. It took up far too much time which I would rather have spent drawing battles and playing with fire.

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 a Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.

all the higher grades of science, imagination and intuition play an increasingly important role over and above intellect and its capacity for application.

A work of art must relate something that does not appear in its visible form.

Women who are of "fairy-like" character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her.

Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.

I found sometimes, that it is of great help in handling such a case, to encourage them, to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their "mythology.

There exists a mythopoetic imagine which has vanished from our rational age. Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the unconscious. It is considered the path of error, of equivocation and misunderstanding. Unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous, it is a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.

Todo pensamiento, todo sentimiento y toda percepción están compuestos por imágenes psíquicas, y el mismo mundo que nos rodea existe únicamente en la medida en que somos capaces de crear una imagen de él. Nuestro estar presos y limitados por la psique ha provocado en nosotros una impresión tan honda que estamos dispuestos a aceptar que en la psique existen cosas de las que no tenemos conocimiento. Esas cosas son lo que llamamos «lo inconsciente».

He was the man I mentioned who was obsessed by the idea that he had cancer, although X-rays had proved to him that it was all imaginary. Who or what caused this idea? It obviously derived from a fear that was not caused by observation of the facts. It suddenly overcame him and then remained.

I myself recently dreamed that a UFO came speeding towards me which turned out to be the lens of a magic lantern whose projected image was myself; this suggested to me that I was the figure, himself deep in meditation, who is produced by a meditating yogi.

For him the religious significance of the immediate experience of the object was so great that his imagination was spellbound by the concretism of the material presence of the sacred body.

By confining our activity to a single sphere we have handed ourselves over to a master who is not infrequently to end up by suppressing the rest of our capacities. While in one place a luxuriant imagination ravages the hard-earned fruits of the intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart might have warmed itself and the fancy been enkindled.

Not the artist alone, but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy.

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work.

But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

It must not be forgotten that it is just in the imagination that a man's highest value may lie.

Dreams, visions, fantasies, and delusions are expressive of a situation.

What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth.

Paul Klee, who may be regarded as the poet among modern painters, says: "It is the artist's mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth.