Imagination quotes

Imagination

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Imagination quotes (page 43 of 171)

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Emily Barton Author
Imagination

"Time is finite and the demands of the imagination and also the demands of the world are infinite, so sort of brokering some kind of agreement between those things is a continual, and for me, and ever-changing challenge."

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Esther Perel Psychotherapist, Author
Imagination

"One of the big misconceptions is that affairs or trysts are flings about sex. And sometimes they are, but much more often they are about desire. And that is very different. The desire to feel special, to feel seen, to feel appreciated, to be laughed at or with. The desire to be desired. That does not manifest in a sexual act per se. Affairs make you feel alive. Alchemy means it's not about the actual sex, but the sexuality, the energy, the aura. It's the imagination and anticipation of it as much or instead of the actual experience of it."

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Elizabeth Gilbert Author, Memoirist
Imagination

"I think my weakness as a writer is a limited imagination, and I think my strength is a talent for reflecting the world, or sort of curating things out of the world and putting them into books."

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Bell Hooks Author, Feminist, Social Activist
Imagination

"I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out."

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Benjamin Carson Neurosurgeon, Author, Politician
Imagination

"Reading activates and exercises the mind. Reading forces the mind to discriminate. From the beginning, readers have to recognize letters printed on the page, make them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into concepts. Reading pushes us to use our imagination and makes us more creatively inclined."

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Adrienne Rich Poet, Essayist, Feminist
Imagination

"But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival."

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Adrienne Rich Poet, Essayist, Feminist
Imagination

"Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry."

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Denis Waitley Author, Motivational Speaker
Imagination

"One of the wonderful aspects of the human imagination is its power to break through the barriers of time and space. It can see things not as they are but as the can be."

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Dolly Parton Singer, Songwriter, Actress
Imagination

"When I started the Imagination Library in my hometown, I never dreamed that one day we would be helping Scottish kids."

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Chris Murray Musician
Imagination

"No one can mock your meagre achievements or inability to accomplish the simplest of tasks, if they remain figments of your imagination. You can revel, again and again, in the glory of a fairy tale doomed never to appear in reality."

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Bertrand Russell Philosopher, Mathematician
Imagination

"If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those who best promote life do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal, something that appears to imagination to live in a heaven remote from strife and failure and the devouring jaws of Time."

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