Quotes about imagination

But, as sages have long said, the sexiest part of the body and the best aphrodisiac in the world is the imagination.

In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.

As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to "write stories." Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.

We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.

Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.

Fear feeds the imagination.

The imagination is an eye where images remain forever.

The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye.

Perhaps (and probably) it would be true to say that we cannot conceive of anything except what we can see in our minds.

What our eyes see, our imagination can no longer see. The same thing cannot be the object of both kinds of seeing.