Quotes on Imagination

I'm capable of anything, my imagination can give me wings

The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well-sustained attention, firmly and repeatedly focused on the object to be accomplished.

We have the universe to roam in in imagination. It is our virtue to be infinitely varied. The worst tyranny is uniformity.

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.

The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination, in a tight straightjacket.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.

I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically, so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously.

On the mainland, a rain was falling. The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things.

Do not look forward to what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day. Either He will shield you from suffering, or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace, then, put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations, and say continually: 'The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart has trusted in Him and I am helped. He is not only with me but in me and I in Him.'

No man can avail himself of the forces of his creative imagination, while dissipating them.

Perhaps my early problems with dyslexia made me more intuitive: when someone sends me a written proposal, rather than dwelling on detailed facts and figures I find that my imagination grasps and expands on what I read.

Q: What’s hard for you? A: Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Every person must live the inner life in one form or another. Consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily, the inner world will claim us and exact its dues. If we go to that realm consciously, it is by our inner work: our prayers, meditations, dream work, ceremonies, and Active Imagination. If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.

[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality.

A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.

You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.