Motivational Quotes

Imagination

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

- Thoreau, Henry David

Best Quotes about Imagination

The Chinese pianist Liu Chi Kung was imprisoned for seven years during the Cultural Revolution, during which time he had no access to a piano. When he returned to giving concerts again after he was released, his playing was better than ever. Asked how this was possible since he had not practice for seven years, he replied: I did practice, every day. I rehearsed every piece I had ever played, note by note, in my mind.

Zilbergeld, Bernie

In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary instincts.

Einstein, Albert

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

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

We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of our environment.

Mcdonald, John

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

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Newton, Sir Isaac

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

Brande, Dorothea

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.

Beecher, Henry Ward

10.

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

Bernhard, Sandra

11.

Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and begin to build.

Collier, Robert

12.

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

Bunuel, Luis

13.

One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.

Joubert, Joseph

14.

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.

15.

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.

Sade, Marquis De

16.

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

Ruskin, John

17.

Make every thought, every fact, that comes into your mind pay you a profit. Make it work and produce for you. Think of things not as they are but as they might be. Don't merely dream -- but create!

Collier, Robert

18.

To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?

Blake, William

19.

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

20.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

I noticed an almost universal trait among Super Achievers, and it was what I call Sensory Goal Vision. These people knew what they wanted out of life, and they could sense it multidimensionally before they ever had it. They could not only see it, but also taste it, smell it, and imagine the sounds and emotions associated with it. They pre-lived it before they had it. And the sharp, sensory vision became a powerful driving force in their lives.

Devore, Stephen

22.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Covey, Stephen R.

23.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

24.

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

25.

I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. First I see the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I see the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on landing. Then there is a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality.

Nicklaus, Jack

26.

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.

Hill, Napoleon

27.

The great successful men of the world have used their imaginations... they think ahead and create their mental picture, and the go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building -- steadily building.

Collier, Robert

28.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Conrad, Joseph

29.

We live by our imagination, our admiration s, and our sentiments.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

Johnson, Samuel

32.

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

Meredith, George

33.

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

34.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

Sean O'Faolain

35.

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

36.

Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination.

Vizinczey, Stephen

37.

The bridges that you cross before you come to them are over rivers that aren't there.

Brown, Gene

38.

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

Cooley, Charles Horton

39.

Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to form of mental agoraphobia and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters, they are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude through our own apathy.

J.K. Rowling

40.

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

Collier, Robert

41.

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

Douglas, Mack R.

42.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Stevens, Wallace

43.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

You cannot depend on your judgments when your imagination is out of focus.

Twain, Mark

45.

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

Bacall, Lauren

46.

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

47.

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

Shaw, P.K.

48.

Memory feeds imagination.

Amy Tan

49.

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

50.

There is nothing more frightful than imagination without taste.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von