Quotes About Imagination

Thus, to give an obvious instance, if I have once enjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and been lulled into a deep repose by the sound of a brook running at its feet, I am sure that wherever I can find a tree and a brook, I can enjoy the same pleasure again. Hence, when I imagine these objects, I can easily form a mystic personification of the friendly power that inhabits them, Dryad or Naiad, offering its cool fountain or its tempting shade. Hence the origin of the Grecian mythology.

The path of genius is free, and its own

We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.

Todo aquello que se encuentra fuera del alcance del sentido y del conocimiento, todo aquello que se percibe defectuosamente, la imaginación lo recompone a su antojo; y todo menos el momento presente, menos el lugar presente, la pasión lo reclama para sí, lo incuba con las alas extendidas y le imprime su propia imagen. La pasión es dueña del espacio infinito y los objetos distantes nos gustan porque limitan con sus confines y se moldean con su contacto.

The most dreadful scenes, the worst in Dante's Inferno, for example, can be visualized by the inner eye; and sounds, too, are conveyed to us in a description so that they can be heard mentally; but it is not so with smells.

This report inflamed my mind to such a degree that I could not rest by night or day for dreaming golden dreams, and considering how to get to that rich district, unknown to civilized men.

The British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent. Naturally, he looks eagerly forward to the time of escape, which he fondly imagines will be when his boyhood is over and he is free of masters.

A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.

The thing is, I don't believe in most of what's done. The amount of financial and imaginative energy that's put into mediocrity is just amazing which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being.

Luckily, literature—and by "literature" I mean comic books—provides us a way to discuss issues like these without having to experience them. We don't have to trick people into standing in front of a runaway trolley, and we don't have to have a real-life Batman and Joker. That's what thought experiments are for—they let us play through an imaginary scenario and imagine what we should or shouldn't do.

The conscious process is reflected in the imagination the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.

Governments do not create, individuals create. Every invention was once just a thought inside someones head.

Psychologist Richard Gerrig defines a narrative as a device that temporarily mentally transports the listener or reader away from their immediate surroundings; when it ends, they return to their surroundings "somewhat changed by the journey.

a high degree of narrative transportation impairs one's critical facilities.

Immanuel Kant is credited with saying, "If the stars came out only once in a lifetime, we'd stay up all that night." Now we stay up late in Plato's cave just to watch the enervated stars on The Tonight Show.

Genius… means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.

Live as if you already are what you wish to become.

So if you're a robot and you're living on this planet, you can do things that you can't do in real life - things that you wished you could do: like fly like have a car that flies like have furniture that is alive.

To understand pretending is to conquer all barriers of time and space.

you know, a daydream properly utilized can be the most powerful force in the universe. One need only dream of freedom to begin to break the spell of enslavement.

to understand pretending," Ombric was fond of saying, "is to conquer all barriers of time and space.