Quotes about imagination

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

— Muhammad Ali

When you stop having dreams and ideals -- well, you might as well stop altogether.

— Marian Anderson

Act as if you have already achieved your goal and it is yours.

— Dr. Robert Anthony

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

— Lauren Bacall

To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is. He said, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

— Richard Bach

Man is an imagining being.

— Gaston Bachelard

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.

— Henry Ward Beecher

Sentiment is the ripened fruit of fantasy.

— Madame Belazy

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

— E. T. Bell

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

— John Berger

If you close your eyes, you could just as well imagine me to be vintage Ali MacGraw, circa 1968.

— Sandra Bernhard

The way we imagine ourselves to appear to another person is an essential element in our conception of ourselves. In other words, I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.

— Robert Bierstedt

To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?

— William Blake

What is now proved was only once imagined.

— William Blake

The human race is governed by its imagination.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Imagination rules the world.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.

— Dorothea Brande

To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery --even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness --is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.

— Andre Breton

The bridges that you cross before you come to them are over rivers that aren't there.

— Gene Brown

Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.

— Les Brown

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

— Luis Bunuel

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

— Thomas Carlyle

Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.

— Thomas Carlyle

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.

— Rachel Carson

People can die of mere imagination.

— Geoffrey Chaucer

The great successful men of the world have used their imaginations... they think ahead and create their mental picture, and the go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building -- steadily building.

— Robert Collier

Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and begin to build.

— Robert Collier

See the things you want as already yours. Think of them as yours, as belonging to you, as already in your possession.

— Robert Collier

Pictures help you to form the mental mold...

— Robert Collier

Make every thought, every fact, that comes into your mind pay you a profit. Make it work and produce for you. Think of things not as they are but as they might be. Don't merely dream -- but create!

— Robert Collier

I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.

— Billy Connelly

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

— Joseph Conrad

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

— Charles Horton Cooley

Death is the tyrant of the imagination.

— Barry Cornwall

When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.

— Emile Coue

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

— Stephen R. Covey

We are what and where we are because we have first imagined it.

— Donald Curtis

I noticed an almost universal trait among Super Achievers, and it was what I call Sensory Goal Vision. These people knew what they wanted out of life, and they could sense it multidimensionally before they ever had it. They could not only see it, but also taste it, smell it, and imagine the sounds and emotions associated with it. They pre-lived it before they had it. And the sharp, sensory vision became a powerful driving force in their lives.

— Stephen Devore

The mind must see visual achievement of the purpose before action is initiated.

— Mack R. Douglas

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

— Albert Einstein

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.

— Albert Einstein

The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.

— Albert Einstein

Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions.

— Albert Einstein

In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary instincts.

— Albert Einstein

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We live by our imagination, our admiration s, and our sentiments.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind's eye and you will be drawn toward it. Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be.

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

Image creates desire. You will what you imagine.

— J. G. Gallimore

Peak performers develop powerful mental images of the behavior that will lead to the desired results. They see in their mind's eye the result they want, and the actions leading to it.

— Charles A. Garfield

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.

— Jules de Gaultier

Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.

— Ralph Gerard

There is nothing more frightful than imagination without taste.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.

— Napoleon Hill

Our minds become magnetized with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds and these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.

— Napoleon Hill

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

— Napoleon Hill

Capability means imagination...

— Napoleon Hill

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

— Napoleon Hill

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the as if technique.

— William James

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

— Samuel Johnson

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

— Joseph Joubert

One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.

— Joseph Joubert

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

— Carl Jung

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

— Carl Jung

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

— John Keats

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.

— Charles F. Kettering

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.

— Charles F. Kettering

Soft focus is an important skill that can effect us metaphorically. In other words, the way we see the future has everything to do with how well we can look up and see the expanded horizon before us.

— Peter Kline

We are told never to cross a bridge till we come to it, but this world is owned by men who have crossed bridges in their imagination far ahead of the crowd.

— Speakers Library

Some people have just enough imagination to spoil their judgment.

— Paul Mallory

Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.

— Maxwell Maltz

Study the situation thoroughly, go over in your imagination the various courses of action possible to you and the consequences which can and may follow from each course. Pick out the course which gives the most promise and go ahead.

— Maxwell Maltz

When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative success mechanism within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or willpower.

— Maxwell Maltz

For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.

— Maxwell Maltz

Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.

— Maxwell Maltz

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

— Paul Mccartney

We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of our environment.

— John Mcdonald

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

— H. L. Mencken

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

— George Meredith

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

— Henry Miller

You must first clearly see a thing in your mind before you can do it.

— Alex Morrison

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilizer. It is important to recognize that in our time man has not written one word, thought one thought, put two notes or two bricks together, splashed color on to canvas or concrete into space, in a manner which will be of any conceivable imaginative interest to posterity.

— Malcolm Muggeridge

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

— Vladimir Nabokov

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

— Sir Isaac Newton

I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. First I see the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I see the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on landing. Then there is a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality.

— Jack Nicklaus

It takes as much imagination to create debt as to create income.

— Leonard Orr

Imagination decides everything.

— Blaise Pascal

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in this world.

— Blaise Pascal

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?

— Cesare Pavese

Celebrate what you want to see more of.

— Thomas J. Peters

Everything you can imagine is real.

— Pablo Picasso

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

— Edgar Allan Poe

It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.

— Ezra Pound

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

— Marcel Proust

I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money.

— George Weiss Rainbow

The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized.

— Mary Caroline Richards

It is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest.

— John Ruskin