Quotes about imagination

Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shall not question!" But we question. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind's deepest sense of creativity.

Only those with narrow minds fail to see that the definition of impossible is "Lack of imagination and incentive."

“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”

Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.

The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.

We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious.

Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

"This isn’t about what is," said Mr. Nancy. "It’s about what people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things."

People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.

A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy, which the day hath left undigested; or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imaginations.

I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain