Quotes About Imagination

I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.

Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet?... these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

De los diversos instrumentos inventados por el hombre, el más asombroso es el libro; todos los demás son extensiones de su cuerpo… Sólo el libro es una extensión de la imaginación y la memoria".

el vago rosa trémulo que se ve con los ojos cerrados

Poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Por lo demás, la literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido.

The acts of madmen exceed the previsions of the sane.

And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger. Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird.

Ajedrez misterioso la poesía, cuyo tablero y cuyas piezas cambian como en un sueño y sobre el cual me inclinaré después de haber muerto.

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. - Blindness

A veces en las tardes una cara Nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo; El arte debe ser como ese espejo Que nos revela nuestra propia cara. (At times in the evenings a face Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror; Art should be like that mirror Which reveals to us our own face.)

In my own case, the process is more or less unvarying. I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have had to retrace my steps by way of the shadows.

The notion of art as a compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing. A writer can conceive a fable, Kipling acknowledged, without grasping its moral. He must be true to his imagination, and not to the mere ephemeral circumstances of a supposed 'reality'.

I still hold two images of the ranch – the one I brought with me and the one my eyes finally saw.

Hemos soñado el mundo. Lo hemos soñado resistente, misterioso, visible, ubicuo en el espacio y firme en el tiempo; pero hemos consentido en su arquitectura tenues y eternos insterticios de sinrazón para saber que es falso.

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast—I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people—perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven—but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination.

Todo el mundo sabe dónde encontrar la poesía. Y, cuando aparece, uno siente el roce de la poesía, ese especial estremecimiento.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly, or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes

Tanr?sal bir çiçeÄŸin ya da düÅŸüncedeki bir çiçeÄŸin, geleceÄŸin çiçeÄŸi olmas?, güncel zamanda atomlar? henüz birleÅŸmemiÅŸ ve farkl? yerlerde bulunan çeliÅŸkili bir çiçek olmas? daha da inan?lmaz.

A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.

Poetry is given to the poet. I don't think a poet can sit down at will and write. If he does, nothing worthwhile can come of it.

El ejecutor de una empresa atroz debe imaginar que ya la ha cumplido, debe imponerse un porvenir que sea irrevocable como el pasado.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.