Quotes About Imagination

Whenever one is imagining a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct—it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

Y dijieron uno al otro: He aquì viene el soñador.

Para soñar hace falta libertad, soledad...

Sin sueños no hay vida!

If you build it, he will come.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Anxiety is fear about what may happen in the future, and it occurs only when the mind is imagining what the future may bring. But when your attention is on the here and now, the actions which need to be done in the present have their best chance of being successfully accomplished, and as a result the future will become the best possible present. So

III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough/ This dream itself had all my thought and love

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.