Quotes about imagination

The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.

— John Ruskin

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

— John Ruskin

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

— John Ruskin

The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

— Marquis De Sade

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.

— Marquis De Sade

Imagination gallops; judgment merely walks.

— Saying

Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.

— Robert H. Schuller

The entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and an actualizer. He can visualize something, and when visualizes it he sees exactly how to make it happen.

— Robert L Schwartz

Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.

— Rod Serling

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

— George Bernard Shaw

People often get their imagination's mixed up with their memories.

— P.K. Shaw

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

When you think something, you think in picture. You don't think a thought in words. You think a picture that expresses your thought. Working with this picture will produce it into your experience.

— Grace Speare

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

— Wallace Stevens

The imagination is man's power over nature.

— Wallace Stevens

By visualizing your goals, you can get your subconscious to work toward making these mental pictures come true.

— Success Magazine

Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the vacuum wireless light, my turbine engine and many other devices have all been developed in exactly this way.

— Nikola Tesla

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

— Henry David Thoreau

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

— Henry David Thoreau

We can gradually grow into any condition we desire, provided we first make ourselves in habitual mental attitude the person who corresponds to those conditions.

— Thomas Troward

You cannot depend on your judgments when your imagination is out of focus.

— Mark Twain

Imagination is the pontoon bridge making way for the timid feet of reason.

— Source Unknown

If you clearly and vividly IMAGINE yourself in the first person doing, being, having the things and qualities you truly want... then you will be using positive imagination to begin a change to fulfilling that image.

— Source Unknown

You must pre-live the future... not re-live the past... and savor the moment.

— Source Unknown

Great living starts with a picture held in the imagination, of what you would like to do or be.

— Source Unknown

It is important to rely on your imagination for your sense of humor and your memory for your truths. Not the other way around.

— Source Unknown

Anyone who thinks the sky is the limit, has limited imagination.

— Source Unknown

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.

— Jules Verne

Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination.

— Stephen Vizinczey

I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

— Voltaire

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Understand that you, yourself, are no more than the composite picture of all your thoughts and actions. In your relationships with others, remember the basic and critically important rule: If you want to be loved, be lovable. If you want respect, set a respectable example!

— Denis Waitley

You have all the reason in the world to achieve your grandest dreams. Imagination plus innovation equals realization.

— Denis Waitley

If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.

— William A. Ward

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

— Oscar Wilde

What you see is what you get.

— Flip Wilson

An idea is salvation by imagination.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

First have being in your mind. Make real in your mind then bring that being into reality. The genius is he who sees what is not yet and causes it to come to be.

— Peter Nivio Zarlenga

The Chinese pianist Liu Chi Kung was imprisoned for seven years during the Cultural Revolution, during which time he had no access to a piano. When he returned to giving concerts again after he was released, his playing was better than ever. Asked how this was possible since he had not practice for seven years, he replied: I did practice, every day. I rehearsed every piece I had ever played, note by note, in my mind.

— Bernie Zilbergeld

There exists somewhere, around us, without or within us, in the depths of the unseen world, spheres where are formed the eternal images reflected in our intellects, and which the artist or poet filch from Mystery by the magic ...power of their imagination, that mysterious divine faculty which must be known in order to be in tune with the harmony of the World.

— jean delville

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

— Albert Einstein