Quotes About Imagination

I excuse you from having to appear in my idea of you.

Everything, for us, is in our concept of the world. To modify our concept of the world is to modify the world for us, or simply to modify the world, since it will never be, for us, anything but what it is for us.

Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so.

espejos fantásticos que se deforman en reflexiones

Del amor sólo he exigido que nunca dejase de ser un sueño lejano.

Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming. — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics, 2002)

To live is to crochet according to a pattern we were given. But while doing it the mind is at liberty, and all enchanted princes can stroll in their parks between one and another plunge of the hooked ivory needle. Needlework of things … Intervals … Nothing …

Diktaren är en låtsare. / Han låtsas så fullständigt / att han till och med låtsas ha ont / av de smärtor han verkligen känner.

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are the truly happy men, because they have all renounced their personality — the first because he lives by instinct, which is impersonal, the second because he lives through his imagination, which is oblivion, and the third because he does not live and, not yet having died, sleeps.

No he hecho más que soñar. Ése ha sido y sigue siendo, incluso, el sentido de mi vida. Nunca he tenido otra preocupación verdadera que no fuese mi vida interior. Los mayores dolores de mi vida se desvanecen cuando, al abrir la ventana hacia la calle de mis sueños, consigo enajenarme en la visión de su movimiento.

Tenho pensamentos que, se conseguisse realizá-los e torná-los vivos, acrescentariam uma nova luz às estrelas, uma nova beleza ao mundo e um maior amor ao coração dos homens.

Every good conversation should be a two-way monologue… We should ultimately be unable to tell whether we really talked with someone or simply imagined the conversation… The best and profoundest conversations, and the least morally instructive ones, are those that novelists have between two characters from one of their books.

To imagine, without being, is the throne. To desire, without wanting, is the crown. We have what we renounce, for we conserve it eternally intact in our dreams, by the light of the sun that isn't, or of the moon that cannot be.

Note that the art of dreaming is not the art of directing our dreams. To direct is to act. The true dreamer surrenders to himself, is possessed by himself.

Ä°stemeden var?m ve istemeden öleceÄŸim. OlduÄŸum ÅŸeyle olmad???m ÅŸey aras?nda, hayal ettiÄŸim ÅŸeyle hayat?n beni yapt??? ÅŸey aras?nda bir boÅŸluÄŸum.

When it comes to dreams, I'm no different from the errand boy and the seamstress. The only thing that distinguishes me from them is that I can write. Yes, that's an activity, a real fact about myself that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I'm just the same.

20 [56] That is the central error of a literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.

Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn't be able to. An assistant bookkeeper can imagine himself to be a Roman emperor; the King of England can't do that, because the King of England has lost the ability in his dreams to be any other king than the one he is. His reality does not allow him to exist.

I know of no pleasure like that of books, yet I read very little. Books are the entryway to dreams, but people at ease in life don't need such introductions to enter into conversation with dreams. I could never read a book and give myself over to it; always, with each step, the commentary of my intellect or my imagination interrupts the narrative sequence. After some minutes I am the one who writes and the writing is nowhere to be seen.

Sólo sabe escribir quien es capaz de ver sus propios sueños con nitidez (y es así) o ver en sueños la vida, verla de forma inmaterial, haciéndole fotos con la máquina del devaneo, sobre la cual los rayos de lo pesado, de lo útil y de lo restringido no pueden actuar, revelándose en negro la placa espiritual.

Me doro con ponientes supuestos, pero lo supuesto está vivo en la suposición.

Ah, no hay nostalgia más dolorosa que la de las cosas que nunca han sucedido!

With this thoroughly established, complete and autonomous plays can unfold in us line by line. We may no longer have the energy to write them, but that won't be necessary. We'll be able to create secondhand; we can imagine one poet writing in us in one way, while another poet will write in a different way. I, having refined this skill to a considerable degree, can write in countlessly different ways, all of them original.

We're stories telling stories, (…)