Imagination quotes
3.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside imagination — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Christ himself came down and took possession of me. . . I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. . . in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my sense nor my imagination had any part: I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love."
"The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert."
"That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather."
"Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself."
"I am not even six feet tall. Yet I am praying to the Absolute Supreme to reach His infinite Height, which is far beyond even my imagination's flight. For me to long to grow into that Height - is this not a miracle? I am mortal. My thoughts, my deeds, my experiences - everything that I have and everything that I am - represent mortality. Yet despite everything that I have and everything that I am, I am longing for Immortality. Is this not a miracle?"
"It's the fact that fans still care. I like all the comics conventions: The smaller ones are easier, the bigger ones are exciting.... Each one I say: Never again. But they're all great.... These things are important because they keep the fans' interest alive in comics. They keep the fans reading and their imaginations stimulated."
"Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert."
"Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination."
"This is probably the single great subject of horror fiction: our need to cope with a mystery that can be understood only with the aid of a helpful imagination."
"First of all, begin to live out of the glory of your imagination, not your memory."
"Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought."
"Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me."
"There is no oil so thick as to destroy the imagination."
"I'm not so naive that I didn't know or didn't suspect that, at some point, someone was going to say "You're writing about the occult." My wizarding world is a world of imagination. I think it is a moral world."
"Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are."
"Extraordinary imagination, especially in a witch world. Also friendship."
"Ginny came in to visit while you were unconscious", he said, after a long pause, and Harry's imagination zoomed into overdrive, rapidly constructing a scene in which Ginny, weeking over his lifeless form, confessed her feelings of deep attraction to him while Ron gave them his blessing."
"My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story."
"To an imagination of any scope the most far reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas"
"All you need is your own imagination. So use it that's what it's for."
