Quotes About Imagination

Dinner parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company. But the people in question are the same. We would have liked to know Mme de Pompadour, who was so stalwart a patron of the arts, and we would have been as bored in her company as we are among all the modern Egerias108 at whose houses we cannot bring ourselves to pay a second call, so mediocre is their company.

which there was already installed a lady with a massive face, old and ugly, with a masculine expression, very much in her Sunday best, who was reading the Revue des Deux Mondes. Notwithstanding her commonness, she was eclectic in her tastes, and I found amusement in asking myself to what social category she could belong; I at once concluded that she must be the manager of some large brothel, a procuress on holiday. Her face, her manner, proclaimed the fact aloud.

Those in love see renunciation in the same light: they imagine it while living in a state that is its opposite; and, never having so much as begun to try it, they cannot believe in its power of healing.

We are bored at a dinner-table because our imagination is absent, and because it is bearing us company we are interested in a book.

We lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same moment the sole preoccupation of others.

Et voici que le monde(qui n'a pas été créé une fois, mais aussi souvent qu'un artiste original est survenu) nous apparait entièrement différent de l'ancien, mais parfaitement clair.

there is always less egoism in pure imagination than in recollection;

as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines.

No doubt I had long been prepared, by virtue of the sway exercised over my imagination and my ability to be moved by the example of Swann, to believe that what I feared was true, instead of what I would have wished for. Thus the comfort brought by Albertine's affirmations was all but compromised for a moment because I recalled the story of Odette.

having the slightest connection either in intensity or in quality with the unimaginable hell that Françoise had allowed me to glimpse when she said, "Miss Albertine has left." In order to represent an unknown situation, the imagination borrows elements already known, and for this reason fails to represent it.

These accounts helped my imagination, in after years, to take the line of supposing that Albertine might, instead of being a good girl, have had the same immorality, the same faculty of deception as a reformed prostitute, and I thought of all the sufferings that would in that case have been in store for me had I ever really been her lover

Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.

all those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had enwrapped

Reading is at the threshold of our inner life; it can lead us into that life but cannot constitute it.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those we had regarded as not being lived at all : the days spent wholly with a favourite book

É admirável como o ciúme, que passa o tempo a fazer pequenas suposições do que é falso, tem pouca imaginação quando se trata de descobrir o que é verdadeiro.

Tuo metu aš buvau ?simyl?j?s teatr?, žinoma, platoniška meile, nes t?vai dar niekad nebuvo leid? man tenai nueiti, ir tok? menk? tetur?jau supratim?, kas tai per malonumas, kad bemaž tik?jau, jog teatre kiekvienas ži?ri tartum pro stereoskop? ? dekoracijas, rodomas jam vienam, nors ir visai panašias ? t?kstan?ius kit?, kurias mato visi ži?rovai, tiktai kiekvienas atskirai.

But, just as we are devoid of that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as close the concerned attention of people who, on the contrary, never give us a thought, and not suspecting that during this same time we are the sole preoccupation of others.

How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed.

Et elle m'a répondu textuellement : « Il faut toujours dire une chose comme si on était en train de la composer soi-même. » Si vous y réfléchissez c'est monumental, cette réponse !

She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write.

Ogni lettore, quando legge, legge se stesso.

But the imagination goes beyond the reality in supposition.

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