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Quotes About Imagination

The imagination is committed to the justice of wholeness. It will not choose one side in an inner conflict and repress or banish the other; it will endeavor to initiate a profound conversation between them in order that something original can be born. The imagination loves symbol because it recognizes that inner divinity can only find expression in symbolic form. The symbol never gives itself completely to the light. It invites thought precisely because it resides at the threshold of darkness.
~ John O'Donohue
The beauty of the imagination is that it can discover such magnificent vastness inside a tiny space. Our culture is dominated by quantity. Even those who have plenty hunger for more and more. Everywhere around us, the reign of quantity extends and multiplies. Sadly the voyage of greed has all the urgency but no sense of destination. Desire becomes inflated and loses all sense of vision and proportion. When beauty becomes an acquisition it brings no delight.
~ John O'Donohue
All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking.
~ John O'Donohue
Imagination is the most reverent mirror of the soul.
~ John O'Donohue
Imagination according to William Blake is about the awakening to and recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that there is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake.
~ John O'Donohue
I often think that there is, in every life, some haunted room that you never want to go into, and that you do your best to forget was there at all. You will never break in that door with your mind, or with your will. Only with the gentle coaxing of the imagination will that door be opened to you and will you be given the gift back again of a part of yourself that either you or someone else had forced you to drive away and reject.
~ John O'Donohue
And here are we, even if we are old, we still have time, and time is always full of possibility. It would really be a great gift that an old person could give to themselves, the gift of recognizing the possibilities that are in that time, and to use their imagination. The imagination is the gateway to a full life, and people who awaken their imagination come in to a force field of possibility and there are doors opening everywhere. I think it is unknown what you can do if you begin to see it.
~ John O'Donohue
Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than their facts.
~ John O'Donohue
The root of an unmortified course is the digestion of sin without bitterness in the heart. When a man hath confirmed his imagination to such an apprehension of grace and mercy as to be able, without bitterness, to swallow and digest daily sins, that man is at the very brink of turning the grace of God into lasciviousness, and being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
~ John Owen
The pretended desires of many to behold the glory of Christ in heaven, who have no view of it by faith while they are here in this world, are nothing but self-deceiving imaginations.
~ John Owen
Thoughts are the great purveyors of the soul to bring in provision to satisfy its affections; and if sin remain unmortified in the heart, they must ever and anon53 be making provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof. They must glaze, adorn, and dress the objects of the flesh, and bring them home to give satisfaction; and this they are able to do, in the service of a defiled imagination, beyond all expression.
~ John Owen
They must glaze, adorn, and dress the objects of the flesh, and bring them home to give satisfaction; and this they are able to do, in the service of a defiled imagination, beyond all expression.
~ John Owen
There is no imagination wherewith man is besotted, more foolish, none so pernicious as this,- that persons not purified, not sanctified, not made holy in their life, should afterwards be taken into that state of blessedness which consists in the enjoyment of God. Neither can such persons enjoy God, nor would God be a reward to them. Holiness is perfected in heaven: but the beginning of it is invariably confined to this world.
~ John Owen
None of the children of men can attain so great glory, power, and dominion in this world, but that in their imaginations and desires they can infinitely exceed what they do enjoy, like him who wept that he had not another world to conquer. They
~ John Owen
When a man hath confirmed his imagination to such an apprehension of grace and mercy as to be able, without bitterness, to swallow and digest daily sins, that man is at the very brink of turning the grace of God into lasciviousness, and being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
~ John Owen
If you close your eyes, you will be a party to all that comes after.
~ John Patrick Shanley
If the world is as you dream it, why had I dreamed such a world?
~ John Perkins
Rapacious great power is ruthless and vindictive; many of us can't imagine because we're not like that in our lives. John Pilger
~ John Pilger
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride
~ John Ray
a giant, stoned, hyperactive catzilla
~ John Ringo
Second star to the right and straight on to morning.
~ John Ringo
Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them.
~ John Ruskin
If some people see angels where others only see empty space, let them paint the angels; only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel too, on any calculated principles of the angelic.
~ John Ruskin
you never will love art well, till you love what she mirrors better
~ John Ruskin