Quotes About Imagination

the ideas I found in books helped me imagine a life I wanted to live.

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.

My books. They were my only real friends growing up.

We all keep our delusions with us. Sometimes it's a person, sometimes an idea, sometimes even a dream that seems more real in memory than it ever did in life.

Above all, Leonardo's relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.

A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.

How did he get his ideas? "I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.

Innovation requires articulation.

Leonardo's relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.

So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, "You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born."5 We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.

Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.

Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present.

He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.

Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don't know how it works. They don't fully understand what I knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination."8

how the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

After the applause, he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point, about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no matter how hard she tries she can't believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Especially from the front rows, there was a roar of knowing laughter.

La ventaja competitiva de una sociedad no vendrá de lo bien que se enseñe en sus escuelas la multiplicación y las tablas periódicas, sino de lo bien que se sepa estimular la imaginación y la creatividad.

It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.

Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought," Wiener wrote. "This is not the case."14 The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking.

Critical comments by students should be taken in a friendly spirit," he said. "Accumulation of material should not stifle the student's independence." A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

The fifteenth century of Leonardo and Columbus and Gutenberg was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own. That is why we have much to learn from Leonardo. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity. So, too, was his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical.