Quotes About Imagination

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

We all know Aesop's fable of the dog who dropped a piece of meat to grasp at its reflection in the water. We must not, however, judge too severely of error. In the initial stages of mental progress, error in symbolic reference is the discipline which promotes imaginative freedom.

Oh, grown-ups cannot understand, And grown-ups never will, How short the way to fairyland Across the purple hill.

Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

There's this guy called Joshua and he knows all about me. I hope he writes my biography, and puts spaceships in it

The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is.

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club?... Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam.

a cultura para massas surripia quanto pode da sensibilidade e da imaginação popu­lar para compensá-la com um lazer mínimo, entrecortado de imagens e slogans de propaganda.

Any one who sits in reverie thus, of course, may see similar ridiculous pictures when the will no longer guides construction. The incongruities of dreams are thus explained.

My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world.

Invention has ever imagination and poetry at its heart.

Our thoughts make spirals in their world.

When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance;

And, with the dark, the Forest came up boldly and pressed against the very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the slates and chimneys.

Of course it was nonsense, but then it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. It has clothed itself in reality.

It is never difficult to credit strangers with the qualities and knowledge that oneself craves for, and no doubt Henriot's active fancy went busily to work.

Air represented a confident and free imagination in which everything was possible. Earth he still loved, but only as a place to land on and take off from.