"The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange."
Read quote
9 likes
Imagination quotes
Imagination
3.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Imagination
Browse quotes that often appear alongside imagination — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Imagination quotes (page 22 of 171)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza."
Read quote
9 likes
"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."
Read quote
9 likes
"Well, no doubt it's a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed."
Read quote
9 likes
"A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully."
Read quote
9 likes
"The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds."
Read quote
9 likes
"...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things."
Read quote
9 likes
"Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination."
Read quote
8 likes
"Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory."
Read quote
8 likes
"Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination."
Read quote
8 likes
"Nothing more powerfully excites any affection than to conceal some part of its object, by throwing it into a kind of shade, whichat the same time that it shows enough to prepossess us in favour of the object, leaves still some work for the imagination."
Read quote
8 likes
"Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers."
Read quote
8 likes
"When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them."
Read quote
8 likes
"'Mind and matter,' said the lady in the wig, 'glide swift into the vortex if immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination.'"
Read quote
8 likes
"The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury."
Read quote
8 likes
"Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave."
Read quote
8 likes
"The true function of logic ... as applied to matters of experience ... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is"
Read quote
8 likes
"Microsoft's only factory asset is the human imagination."
Read quote
8 likes
"Those who are clever in imagination are far more pleased with themselves than prudent men could reasonably be."
Read quote
8 likes
"Energy and imagination are the springboards to wealth creation."
Read quote
8 likes