Explore Quotes on Imagination

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.

If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.

Everyone has options. They are a fixed set of predetermined scenarios, points of view, perceived limitations that already reside in your data bank. If you depend on your options to formulate your future, that future will be no more than a rearrangement of your past. Then he says, “Possibilities are completely different. When you ask ‘what is possible?’ you must stretch your imagination out of the confines of the familiar. To live a life beyond the mediocre, ask not ‘what are my options?’ but ‘What is possible?’

Possibilities are completely different. When you ask 'what is possible?' you must stretch your imagination out of the confines of the familiar. To live a life beyond the mediocre, ask not 'what are my options?' but 'What is possible?'

The close observer soon discovers that the teacher's task is not to implant facts but to place the subject to be learned in front of the learner and, through sympathy, emotion, imagination, and patience, to awaken in the learner the restless drive for answers and insights which enlarge the personal life and give it meaning.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

Imagination grows by exercise.

I like the idea of not being afraid of letting your imagination rule you, to feel the freedom of expression, to let creativity be your overwhelming drive rather than other things.

Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations.

Barney Kessel was 'Mr. Guitar,' the foremost jazz guitarist of his generation. He had an amazing imagination, his solos were incredible, he swung his tail off, he was a heck of an arranger and could out-read anybody.

I don't like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out and planned before hand ... you've got to give the band something to use its imagination on as well. That can make a very ordinary song come alive into something totally different ... the X-factor - so important in rock and roll - which is the feel.

While the world of reality has its limits, the world of your imagination is without boundaries

That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our life and character.

What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination

It doesn't take any imagination at all to feel awed

There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred, social, and joyous than at present.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.

If there's one thing I feel very strongly about, it's that there shouldn't be a distinction between pianists who play Ligeti and those who play Chopin. It might seem that they involve different skill sets, but I don't think that's true: whether playing Ives or Bach or Beethoven, you must bring the same imagination, the same sensitivity, and an ability to deal with same kinds of musical problems. The method behind my madness, anyway, is to keep plugging away at this idea.

Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.