Quotes About Imagination

I'd gladly read something that is exceptionally stupid or bad as long as it was done by someone with some sort of personal vision, even if that person was a complete moron.

Think of your windshield as an energy source for your brain. Use pictures (the walls of many talent hotbeds are cluttered with photos and posters of their stars) or, better, video. One idea: Bookmark a few YouTube videos, and watch them before you practice, or at night before you go to bed.

Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before.

Preview Future Connection:

I invented the pelican, but probably not the acorn or unicorn.

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity.

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

Indeed, thinking about the future can be so pleasurable that sometimes we'd rather think about it than get there.

When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won't really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.

Small children cannot say what they want to be later because they don't really understand what later means.

This frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.

we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off.

The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an "anticipation machine," and "making future" is the most important thing it does.2

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine—ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be.

The frontal lobe is the recent addition to the human brain that allows us to imagine the future.

We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.

We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.

The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.

Imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present, and one reason for this is that it must borrow machinery that is owned by perception. The fact that these two processes must run on the same platform means that we are sometimes confused about which one is running. We assume that what we feel as we imagine the future is what we'll feel when we get there, but in fact, what we feel as we imagine the future is often a response to what's happening in the present.

The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes.

The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future.

A wise man once said all children are born knowing what the angels look like

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art." —TWYLA THARP

Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks prearranged. This is because they accept all offers made."9