Imagination Quotes

“The way you separate Reality from Imagination is the number of bandages you have to use.”

“People may think I'm trying something new by telling stories, but they're just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That's what I do.”

“I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.”

“It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.”

“If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.”

“The power of imagination makes us infinite.”

“The dreams we imagine when we are asleep should not in any way make us doubt the truth of the thoughts we have when we are awake.”

“Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.”

“Wine and women do not go with song. Alcohol is the worst enemy of the imagination.”

“From a very young age, stories fuelled my imagination in the most wonderful way.”

“We can conceive of eternity because we cannot conceive of a cessation of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest star and see infinite space beyond.”

“For a long time imagination was all i had. I allowed it to take me to all the places i yearned to be, all the sights i longed to see, make beauty out of all thats been and create art from this suffering.”

“In the beginning, science is a thing imagined; in the beginning, war is a thing imagined; in the beginning, love is a thing imagined; in the beginning, even God is a thing imagined. There is nothing that has not first been imagined. Even before there are words, there is imagination.”

“That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.”

“Imagination is heavenly.”

“Nature: it might be the magical key to unlock a locked imagination.”

“When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.”

“I feel how little it concerns me, everything that’s called "the world," and how grand and exciting what I privately call the world is to me.”

“Our imagination goes ahead of us, bringing our yesterday's imagings into present realities.”

“...it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising out memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room”