Quotes About Imagination

I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.

Jesus on Twitter would have been a pretty amazing thing.

Just getting to wake up and play somebody else for an entire day is just an amazing thing.

I've had several really tangible dreams about UFOs, and they've been amazing!

Ths visions of the mind have a debt to reality that it is hard to get the mind to pay when it is under the influence of its visions.

A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility.

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we know that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

The walls of the rational, empirical world are famously porous. What come through are dreams, imaginings, inspirations, visions, revelations. There is no use in stooping over these with a magnifying lens.

It is the privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable.

When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest: There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but of the body of the Lord. The blessed plants and the sea, yield it to the imagination intact.

For too long the ideal role of the individual in our society—the role the talented young have aspired to almost by convention—has been that of the specialist. It has surely become as plain as it needs to be that what we need most now are not the specialists with their narrowed vision and short-range justifications, but men of sympathy and imagination and free intelligence who can recognize and hold themselves answerable to the complex responsibilities of a man's life in the world.

I knew he that he didn't have the strength to get free. His life was being driven by a kind of flywheel. He had submitted to it and accepted it. It was turning fast. To slow it down or stop it and come to a place that was moving with the motion only of time and loss and slow grief was more, that day, than he could imagine. I knew too that it was more than he could bear.

We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another-that surely would be to have life more abundantly.

What I am sure of is that we have lost the old apprehension of Nature as a being accessible to imagination, linking Heaven and Earth, making and informing the incarnate creation, and requiring of humanity an obedience at once worshipful, ethical, and economic.

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling

Loving the forest, you enter it to walk and watch. As you observe its manifold and comely life, it enters familiarly into imagination, and so into sympathy. By sympathy the mind in the forest is made at home.

Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

There is nothing very instructive, for example, in hearing that "the cow jumped over the moon," but who is not delighted by that poem's exuberant indifference to the possibility of making sense? It is a masterpiece. Even so, I am happy to know that some poems delight and instruct, which is a richer possibility.

If we have equality and nothing else — no compassion, no magnanimity, no courtesy, no sense of mutual obligation and dependence, no imagination — then power and wealth will have their way; brutality will rule.

Both past and future were disappearing from them, the past because nobody would remember it, the future because nobody could imagine it.

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls.

I'm so involved in the process that sometimes at the end of a day, I can look at the piece on my desk and really wonder how it got there. At other times, I really have to struggle with a piece to turn it into what I had in mind. Sometimes, I give up and leave it half finished to work on something else. Then in a few days, when I come back to it, I can see what it wants to be... which sometimes is not at all what I had in mind. When I just let that happen, things seem to go more smoothly.

I suppose I was artistic as a child. Our house was so full of art and artists that it never occurred to me not to be constantly making things. I just assumed that all kids liked to work with their hands as much as I did. I was an only child so I did have a lot of time to be creative by myself and with my parents.

I have a great interest in classical mythology and I need to make a sphinx or satyr every once in awhile to satisfy those interests. (...)