Motivational Quotes

Imagination

When you stop having dreams and ideals -- well, you might as well stop altogether.

- Anderson, Marian

Best Quotes about Imagination

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

Weil, Simone

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

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

Einstein, Albert

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

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

Man is an imagining being.

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Ruskin, John

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

The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

Sade, Marquis De

10.

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

Brown, Les

11.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Proust, Marcel

12.

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

13.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

Stevens, Wallace

14.

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

Pascal, Blaise

15.

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

16.

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

Joubert, Joseph

17.

Soft focus is an important skill that can effect us metaphorically. In other words, the way we see the future has everything to do with how well we can look up and see the expanded horizon before us.

Kline, Peter

18.

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

Bacall, Lauren

19.

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

Hill, Napoleon

20.

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

21.

Imagination decides everything.

Pascal, Blaise

22.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

24.

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

Bell, E. T.

25.

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

Brande, Dorothea

26.

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

Shaw, P.K.

27.

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

Ruskin, John

28.

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

Cooley, Charles Horton

29.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.

Charles F. Kettering

32.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

33.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

Mencken, H. L.

34.

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

Orr, Leonard

35.

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

36.

I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.

Connelly, Billy

37.

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

Bernhard, Sandra

38.

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

Mark Twain

39.

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

40.

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

Collier, Robert

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Weil, Simone

45.

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

46.

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

Collier, Robert

47.

When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.

Coue, Emile

48.

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

49.

Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.

Carlyle, Thomas

50.

The way we imagine ourselves to appear to another person is an essential element in our conception of ourselves. In other words, I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.

Bierstedt, Robert