Imagination quotes
3.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside imagination — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist."
"The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze."
"Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity."
"There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination."
"Life is about trying things to see if they work."
"Inspiration can be found in a pile of junk. Sometimes, you can put it together with a good imagination and invent something."
"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."
"Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)"
"Imagination consists in expelling from reality several incomplete persons, and then using the magic and subversive powers of desire to bring them back in the form of one entirely satisfying presence."
"If there's something more awaiting me in the future, I'd rather leave it up to God since what He creates is far better than my imagination."
"The curve of imagination, the curve of brilliance and the curve of sanity are identical curves or at least similar curves... The more imagination a person has, why, the more intelligence, the more knowingness he has and the saner he's going to be."
"Imagination governs the world."
"I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work."
"The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man."
"All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination."
"If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies."
"I can believe anything provided it is quite incredible."
"The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection."
"The imagination is a pretty precious source of protection."
"I hate deception, even where the imagination only is concerned."
