Quotes About Imagination

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!

True change takes place in the imagination.

The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.

I have plenty of machinery around me; what I really need is a more enchanting world in which to live and work.

A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested; or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations

A dream is nothing else but the echo of our conceits in the day

it scarce hath been heard there were ever two men that dreamed alike

[Burke] is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.

It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time.

It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he is to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.

He liked her stories for the same reason she told them—they should have happened.

Question asked of Thomas Perry. What is the most important thing that you have learned in your writing experience, so far? "If any writer is going to be remembered after he's gone, it will be for the parts of his work that are absolutely original, and would never have existed if he hadn't written them. So if you're writing a scene that you've read, watched, or heard before, then you're wasting your time and your reader's.

When you don't know anything, imagining you know something certainly does cheer you up." "It's the way of the optimist.

Shall I project a world?

The mind uses considerable creativity in constructing a reality for us that makes sense.

We must dare to invent the future.

All writers begin as readers, and the ones worth reading continue life as more prolific readers than writers.

If travel expands our experience and broadens our minds, the anticipation of travel helpfully narrows our reading list.

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

For nothing works greater mischief in theology, I am persuaded, than a simple failure of the imagination, the inability to put things together in imaginative ways.

We have to imagine and create, we have to fantasize, or there's nothing. Passion, desire, romance-those things don't exist unless we make them happen

He looked outside once more. It was like a Bosch painting, except that Bosch lacked the imagination or nerve for this horror. In some forlorn part of his brain Neil heard Abba singing "Fernando" in a tinny voice.

An empty book is like an infant's soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders.