Quotes About Imagination

To be "matter of fact" about the world is to blunder into fantasy--and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

As his eye ( sic ) approached the distant, rounded horizon the details softened, giving a strong effect, of stereo, of depth, of three-dimensional globularness—the world indeed was round!

Robert A. Heinlein

Why? Why does anybody want to go anywhere? Why did the bear go round the mountain? To see what he could see! I've never seen the Rings. That's reason enough to go anywhere. The race has been doing it for all time. The dull ones stay home—and the bright ones stir around and try to see what trouble they can dig up. It's the human pattern. It doesn't need a reason, any more than a flat cat needs a reason to buzz. Why anything?

My husband is a brute. And I've got a cruel stepmother just like Snow White. I mean, Cinderella. And my Pop thinks I'm imaginary. But I love you all anyway because you're all I've got.

I see. Well—got everything you want?" "Yes," admitted Monroe-Alpha, "unless you should happen to have concealed, somewhere about your person, a hypersphere, a hypersurface, and some four-dimensional liquid, suitable for fine lubrication.

Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein

He knew that he did not invent the information brought to him by his senses. There had to be something else out there, some otherness that produced the things his senses recorded. All philosophies that claimed that the physical world around him did not exist except in his imagination were sheer nonsense. But

Robert A. Heinlein

Sharpie, I thought you liked Star Trek?" "I do. But I've seen five years of it and we've got our own Star Trek now.

Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein

Romantic love always consists in the projection of the soul-image. When a woman falls in love it is animus that she sees projected onto the mortal man before her. When a man drinks of the love potion, it is anima, his soul, that he sees superimposed on a woman.

The only alternative to torture is art" George Bernard Shaw. This means we will engage in our creativity or have to face its alternative brutality.

poetry is a special way of imagining the world or, to put this in more cognitive terms, a special mode of thinking with its own momentum and its own peculiar advantages.

Almost the whole range of biblical narrative, however, embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation with others; and a literary perspective on the operations of narrative may help us more than any other to see how this perception was translated into stories that have had such a powerful, enduring hold on the imagination.

The Hebrew imagination, we might note, was unabashedly anthropomorphic but by no means foolishly literalist.

Of course there are robots among us. There are also Magicians among us. I think we take turns playing each role, as a matter of fact. The Magician defines a reality-mesh and the robot lives in it. Grok?

I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

Believe it possible that you can float off the ground and fly by merely willing it. See what happens.

he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.) - Robert Anton Wilson