The Imaginal Institute

Great Thoughts
on Imagination

In completely random order, some lovely ideas about imagination to get your imaginal juices flowing. Enjoy!

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
Albert Einstein

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.
Albert Einstein

Creation is the greatest drug. When you create something, you get this little endorphin buzz. Why do you think Einstein looked like that?
Robin Williams

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine de Saint Exupery

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
Francisco Goya

Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on the open sea of thought.
Francois Gautier

The man with imagination and no culture has wings without feet.
Joseph Joubert

Imagination rules the world.
Napoleon Bonaparte

If one is not half mad how can one give birth to a dancing star?
Nietzsche

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
Ursula K. Le Guin

Imagination is intelligence with an erection.
Victor Hugo

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.
Wallace Stevens

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, -- that is your success.
Henry David Thoreau

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
George Bernard Shaw

In order to get what you want, you must do something you've never done.
Unknown

To regain my youth I'll do anything except get up early, take exercise, or act responsibly.
Oscar Wilde

To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To listen to stars and birds and babes and sages with an open heart. To study hard, think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions. Never hurry. In a word, to let the spiritual, the unbidden and the unconscious rise up through the common. This is my symphony.
William Henry Channing

Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So, get on your way.  
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)

In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.
John Stuart Mill

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.
Sam Levenson

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

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Unknown

Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
Vincent van Gogh

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
John Dewey

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso

Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination.
John Keats

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.
Kurt Vonnegut

What is now proved was once imagined.
William Blake

What would it be like if you lived each day, each breath, as a work of art in progress? Imagine that you are a masterpiece unfolding, every second of every day, a work of art taking form with every breath.
Thomas Crum

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.
Tuli Kupferberg

You are indebted to your imagination for three-fourths of your importance.
David Garrick

You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain

Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.
Louis Aragon

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
Walt Disney

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

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

The possible's slow fuse is lit by the imagination.
Emily Dickinson

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.
John F. Kennedy

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W. Somerset Maugham

Imagination is not a talent of some men, but is the health of every man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Imagination is the eye of the soul.
Joseph Joubert

I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel.
Peter Nivio Zarlenga

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.
Duane Michals

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.
Henry David Thoreau

The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside of us while we live.
N. Cousins