Motivational Quotes

Imagination

Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the vacuum wireless light, my turbine engine and many other devices have all been developed in exactly this way.

- Tesla, Nikola

Best Quotes about Imagination

When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative success mechanism within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or willpower.

Maltz, Maxwell

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our life.

Weil, Simone

Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.

Maltz, Maxwell

The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.

Einstein, Albert

To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is. He said, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

Bach, Richard

For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.

Maltz, Maxwell

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Tom Stoppard

Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.

Maltz, Maxwell

There is nothing more frightful than imagination without taste.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.

Brande, Dorothea

11.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.

Carson, Rachel

12.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilizer. It is important to recognize that in our time man has not written one word, thought one thought, put two notes or two bricks together, splashed color on to canvas or concrete into space, in a manner which will be of any conceivable imaginative interest to posterity.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

13.

Some people have just enough imagination to spoil their judgment.

Mallory, Paul

14.

Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.

Ruskin, John

16.

Pictures help you to form the mental mold...

Collier, Robert

17.

If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.

Ward, William A.

18.

We are told never to cross a bridge till we come to it, but this world is owned by men who have crossed bridges in their imagination far ahead of the crowd.

Library, Speakers

19.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Covey, Stephen R.

20.

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.

Verne, Jules

21.

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

Nabokov, Vladimir

22.

See the things you want as already yours. Think of them as yours, as belonging to you, as already in your possession.

Collier, Robert

23.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

24.

To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery --even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness --is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.

Breton, Andre

25.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

George Bernard Shaw

26.

Peak performers develop powerful mental images of the behavior that will lead to the desired results. They see in their mind's eye the result they want, and the actions leading to it.

Garfield, Charles A.

27.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

Thoreau, Henry David

28.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

It is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest.

Ruskin, John

30.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and relevetory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

J.K. Rowling

31.

You have all the reason in the world to achieve your grandest dreams. Imagination plus innovation equals realization.

Waitley, Denis

32.

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

33.

When you think something, you think in picture. You don't think a thought in words. You think a picture that expresses your thought. Working with this picture will produce it into your experience.

Speare, Grace

34.

Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions.

Einstein, Albert

35.

People often get their imagination's mixed up with their memories.

Shaw, P.K.

36.

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.

Hill, Napoleon

37.

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

Miller, Henry

38.

Great living starts with a picture held in the imagination, of what you would like to do or be.

39.

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

Cooley, Charles Horton

40.

We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling

41.

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

Bacall, Lauren

42.

Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.

Brown, Les

43.

It takes as much imagination to create debt as to create income.

Orr, Leonard

44.

The mind must see visual achievement of the purpose before action is initiated.

Douglas, Mack R.

45.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in this world.

Pascal, Blaise

46.

Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.

Gerard, Ralph

47.

You must pre-live the future... not re-live the past... and savor the moment.

48.

Man is an imagining being.

Bachelard, Gaston

49.

If you close your eyes, you could just as well imagine me to be vintage Ali MacGraw, circa 1968.

Bernhard, Sandra

50.

It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.

Pound, Ezra