Quotes About Imagination

The artist, especially the poet, has always known this to be wrong. He knows that time shortens and lengthens, without regard to the minute hand.

The 5-year-old sees that Paradise correctly, not in technology but in the fairy story, in the great myths that control and guide our lives. And myth is meaning divined rather than defined, implicit rather than explicit.

Books — the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.

Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or 'un-say' the world, to image and speak it otherwise. In that capacity in its biological and social evolution, may lie some of the clues to the question of the origins of human speech and the multiplicity of tongues. It is not, perhaps, 'a theory of information' that will serve us best in trying to clarify the nature of language, but a 'theory of misinformation'.

It is not the literal past that rules us: it is images of the past.

The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.

One is not a "believer" in fairy tales. There is no theology, no body of dogma, no ritual, no institution, no expectation for a form of behavior. They are about the unexpectedness and mutability of the world.

Our world is full of amazing phenomena: a stunningly rapturous sunrise, a night sky spangled with stardust, the fiery beauty of a volcanic lava flow. They all merit a "Oh my!" Humankind's imagination and innovation is truly breathtaking.

If leadership requires a fired-up sense of purpose and imagination, it also demands a profound connection to the society to be led. Like it or not, this is our culture, and we should embrace and celebrate it, even while we strive to refine and shape it.

Science fiction is more than just our collective dreams for a human race that reaches to the stars. In many ways, the dreams of yesterday are becoming the realities of today and the path for tomorrow.

If leadership requires a fired-up sense of purpose and imagination, it also demands a profound connection to the society to be led.

One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.

Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.

Where there is no vision, there is no hope.

Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!

Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else -- an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.

Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

In art there is only one thing that counts; the thing you can't explain.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

Reality can only be illuminated by a ray of poetry. Everything is sleep around us.

If Auschwitz is unthinkable, then we must rethink the bases of our anthropology (Hannah Arendt). If Auschwitz is unsayable, then we must rethink the bases of testimony (Primo Levi). If Auschwitz is unimaginable, we must give the same attention to an image as we do to what witnesses say.

He mostly preached in the evening, when the college church was already shrouded in shadow. And he chose subjects that filled the imagination with salutary fear—sin, Hell, death—painting pictures that were sometimes cajoling, more often harrowing, evoking the effects of the fire on the damned. The little group of pupils listened, apprehensive, sometimes terrified, a distraught flock whose black shepherd is gesticulating towards distant flames.