Quotes About Imagination

Tâchez de garder toujours un morceau de ciel au-dessus de votre vie, petit garçon, ajoutait-il en se tournant vers moi. Vous avez une jolie âme, d'une qualité rare, une nature d'artiste, ne la laissez pas manquer de ce qu'il lui faut.» Quand,

Like a rare species of shrub in a tub, near the carriages, in front of the porch where I was waiting, stood a young page who amazed the eye as much by the remarkable harmonies of his coloured hair as by his plant-like skin.

The wretchedness of ordinary life, endured so gaily when it is part of our normal existence, is made far worse when it comes as something new, and is exaggerated by the working of the imagination.

as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence.

And for another thing, though the imagination is easily teased by the desire for something we cannot possess, its wings are never clipped as they would be by a closer glimpse of reality, in these encounters where the charm of the passing beauty is generally in direct relation to their brevity.

Imagination, thought, may be admirable mechanisms but they can also be inert. Suffering alone sets them going.

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another.

But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself,

Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs.

in the state of mind in which we "observe" we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create. There was, then, embedded in my

My life had been like a painter who climbs up a road overhanging a lake that is hidden from view by a screen of rocks and trees. Through a gap he glimpses it, he has it all there in front of him, he takes up his brushes.

No se nos queda grabada eternamente una imagen con que soñamos porque se embellezca y mejore con el reflejo de los colores extraños que por azar la rodeen en nuestros sueños, porque aquellos paisajes de los libros que leía se me representaban con mayor viveza en la imaginación que los que Combray me ponía delante y los análogos que me hubiera podido presentar.

She insisted, but he would not receive her. He was not even acting out of necessity: she meant nothing to him anymore. Death had rapidly broken the bonds whose enslavement he had been dreading for several weeks. When he tried to think of Oliviane, nothing presented itself to his mind's eye: the eyes of his imagination and of his vanity had closed.

Fortunately, life, which was more powerful than their mockery and whose sweet and strengthening milk he had not fully drained, held out its breast to dissuade him. And he resumed drinking with a joyous voracity, his rich and credulous imagination listening naïvely to the grievances of that ravenousness and making wonderful amends for its blighted hopes.

The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament.

The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul.

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.

Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake.

For we form so extravagant an idea of certain characters that we would be incapable of identifying one of them with the familiar features of a person of our acquaintance.

After the suicide of my thoughts, they admired my intelligence; they doted on my mind. My parched imagination, my dried-up sensitivity were enough for the people who were the thirstiest for an intellectual life—their thirst being as artificial and mendacious as the source from which they believed they were quenching it!

Muitas vezes, é unicamente por falta de espírito criador que não se vai muito longe no sofrimento. E a mais terrível realidade nos concede, ao mesmo tempo que o sofrimento, a alegria de uma bela descoberta, porque só faz doar uma forma clara e nova ao que ruminávamos há muito sem desconfiar.

Like many other men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind and lacked imagination. He knew perfectly well as a general truth that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each individual human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in the light of what was revealed.

If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy.