Motivational Quotes

Imagination

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

- Mark Twain

Best Quotes about Imagination

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

Brown, Gene

Memory feeds imagination.

Amy Tan

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

Einstein, Albert

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

10.

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

Verne, Jules

11.

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

12.

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

Ward, William A.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Man is an imagining being.

Bachelard, Gaston

16.

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.

17.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

18.

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

Bernhard, Sandra

19.

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

20.

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

Bach, Richard

21.

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

Ruskin, John

22.

It is important to rely on your imagination for your sense of humor and your memory for your truths. Not the other way around.

23.

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

Collier, Robert

24.

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

25.

By visualizing your goals, you can get your subconscious to work toward making these mental pictures come true.

Success Magazine

26.

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

27.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.

Ruskin, John

28.

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.

29.

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

Bacall, Lauren

30.

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

Anderson, Marian

31.

Death is the tyrant of the imagination.

Cornwall, Barry

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

You must first clearly see a thing in your mind before you can do it.

Morrison, Alex

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.

Kettering, Charles F.

41.

Sentiment is the ripened fruit of fantasy.

Belazy, Madame

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

Capability means imagination...

Hill, Napoleon

44.

People can die of mere imagination.

Chaucer, Geoffrey

45.

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

46.

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

Orr, Leonard

47.

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

48.

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

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.

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