"Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination."
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 44 of 171)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"So scary watching the news...Like Iraq...could ever under any stretch of the imagination be any threat to us whatsoever."
"Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside."
"Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame."
"Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval."
"The imagination enlarges little objects so as to fill our souls with a fantastic estimate; and, with rash insolence, it belittles the great to its own measure, as when talking of God."
"Anything imagined can be made real ... given sufficient genius."
"Imagination is greater than knowledge."
"The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning."
"Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts."
"The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails."
"There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror."
"It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?"
"If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o’-the-wisps of the imagination."
"I know how to make films and now I'm able to make films with the resources and the tools that match my imagination, and what filmmaker doesn't want to do that? I feel very fortunate to have that. I don't take it for granted."
"It is from this absolute indifference and tranquillity of the mind, that mathematical speculations derive some of the most considerable advantages; because there is nothing to interest the imagination; because the judgment sits free and unbiased to examine the point. All proportions, every arrangement of quantity, is alike to the understanding, because the same truths result to it from all; from greater from lesser, from equality and inequality."
"The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you."
"Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past."
"So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination."
"The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world."