Quotes About Imagination

build-your-own-telescope

Elizabeth Enright

The Messiah is not imagination. It's the truth. It is promised.

Dear me, how I love a library.

If you're alive, you're a creative person.

Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.

Because the truth is, I believe that creativity is a force of enchantment—not entirely human in its origins.

Once Henry had heard a crying noise at sea, and had seen a mermaid floating on the ocean's surface. The mermaid had been injured by a shark. Henry had pulled the mermaid out of the water with a rope, and she had died in his arms...what language did the mermaid speak? Alma wanted to know, imagining that it like almost have to be Greek. English! Henry said. By God, plum, why would I rescue a deuced foreign mermaid?

too many maniacs not enough michelangelos

I only meant that there was a place within my imagination so fathomlessly deep that the light of the real world could never touch it.

I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others.

Creativity is a crushing chore and a glorious mystery. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.

What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it's sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.

Painting working!

A creative life is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.

Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us.

Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome.

Q: What is creativity? A: The relationship between a human being and the mysteries of inspiration.

Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it's a gift. It's the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. It's as if all our gods and angels gathered together and said, "It's tough down there as a human being, we know. Here—have some delights.

As a creator, you can design any sort of jewelry that you like for the inside of other people's minds (or simply for the inside of your own mind). You can make work that's provocative, aggressive, sacred, edgy, traditional, earnest, devastating, entertaining, brutal, fanciful . . . but when all is said and done, it's still just intracranial jewelry-making. It's still just decoration. And that's glorious.

Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome. Your fear—programmed by evolution to be hypervigilant and insanely overprotective—will always assume that any uncertain outcome is destined to end in a bloody, horrible death. Basically, your fear is like a mall cop who thinks he's a Navy SEAL:

Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it's a gift. It's the frosting.

Einstein called this tactic "combinatory play"—the act of opening up one mental channel by dabbling in another.

Inspiration is always trying to work with me. So I sit there and I work, too.