Quotes about imagination

She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.

Anybody who lets facts interfere with his imagination is a person who will never enjoy anything else again.

Sometimes I think you have an overly vivid imagination, Hollis. With some things it’s just not worth thinking about them too carefully before they happen. They almost never turn out to be as horrible as you think they will.

Even the people were bred without imaginations. The imaginative ones were fixed—or gotten rid of. Too dangerous to have a thinker unless he thought the government’s way.

Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.

The power of imagination, of image, which is the fundamental power of literature, is the power to determine a people’s fate.

Imagination is one of our most powerful tools. What we imagine, we can become.

The Sphinx is an unreal creature. It exists solely because it has been imagined. (p. 264)

Anyone with an overactive imagination, in particular a perversely negative one, need never be surprised by anything. The imagination absolutely can catch out imminent disasters as they're warming up, especially if you keep your nostrils open. People who can accurately read the future: are they gifted at seeing or gifted at guessing?

In the face of all kinds of derisions of all the many people, I still firmly believe in my mind that that unique village on the Japan Sea of which oral legend has handed down, the town where only cats' spirits live, must surely exist somewhere, in some part of the universe.

It is, after all, our imagination that makes us human. Vincent van Gogh asked, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” To which the answer is, I would have thought, boring, bordering on pointless.

A fact will often show poor and plain in contrast to the leapings of imagination.