Imaginary Quotes - Page 26

• Imaginary evils are incurable.

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Evil

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• Can you imagine Simon as a kid? His imaginary friends probably never wanted to play with him.

  Paula Abdul

  Friendship, Kids, Play

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• The Bristol Channel was always my guide, and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. It was a great comfort.

  Roald Dahl

  House, Bed, Comfort

  Roald Dahl (2009). “Boy: Tales of Childhood”, p.90, Penguin

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• When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

  Paul Auster

  Life, Pain, Reality

  Paul Auster (2008). “The Brooklyn Follies”, p.103, Faber & Faber

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• The first-born in every family is always dreaming for an imaginary older brother or sister who will look out for them.

  Bill Cosby

  Family, Sister, Dream

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• You reduce illegal immigration by making it harder to get jobs here, or easier to get jobs south of the border. This idea that we can't pass an immigration law until we hit some imaginary security target is just a way to derail reform.

  Gail Collins

  Jobs, Law, Ideas

  "Guns, Guns, Guns". Interview with David Brooks and Gail Collins, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. April 03, 2013.

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• Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Pain, Real, Suffering

  Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

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• It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.

  Andre Breton

  Existence, Surrealism, Elsewhere

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• In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Life, Literature, Adults

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• Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

  George Eliot

  Real, Lying, Heart

  Middlemarch bk. 2, ch. 20 (1871 - 1872)

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• Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God -- imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant -- and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave?

  Richard Dawkins

  Art, Brother, Father

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• Most religion-mongers have bated their paradises with a bit of toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with large promises of possessions in their transmortal El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chimney-corner, but under promise of imaginary islands to govern.

  James Russell Lowell

  Islands, Promise, Religion

  James Russell Lowell (1845). “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets”, p.109

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• The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Real, Grief, Air

  Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.320, Faber & Faber

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• Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Real, Reading, Attention

  Thomas Carlyle, Henry Duff Traill (2010). “The Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.455, Cambridge University Press

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• A court of heraldry sprung up to supply the place of crusade exploits, to grant imaginary shields and trophies to families that never wore real armor, and it is but of late that it has been discovered to have no real jurisdiction.

  William Shenstone

  Real, Sprung Up, Armor

  William Shenstone (1804). “Essays on Men and Manners”, p.36

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• Does a man reproach thee for being proud or ill-natured, envious or conceited, ignorant or detracting? Consider with thyself whether his reproaches are true. If they are not, consider that thou art not the person whom he reproaches, but that he reviles an imaginary being, and perhaps loves what thou really art, though he hates what thou appearest to be.

  Epictetus

  Art, Hate, Conceited

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• The contradictions the mind comes up against, these are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.

  Simone Weil

  Real, Mind, Tests

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• We shouldn't even need the word 'atheism'. If people didn't invent ridiculous imaginary gods, rational people wouldn't have to deny them.

  Ricky Gervais

  People, Religion, Atheism

  Twitter post from Mar 3, 2012

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• Are you still thinking, looking, living, as from an imaginary phenomenal centre?
  As long as you do that you can never recognise your freedom.

  Wei Wu Wei

  Thinking, Long, Phenomenal

  Wei Wu Wei (2004). “Open Secret”, p.52, Sentient Publications

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• I didn't have an imaginary childhood friend, but I did one day imagine somehow tiny green men, and they were only tiny and green because my brother had a ton of toy soldier toys that came on a skateboard plank type of thing, and I just envisioned in this car driving to church with my mom, they were there.

  Jim Parsons

  Mom, Brother, Men

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• When with care we have raised an imaginary treasure of happiness, we find at last that the materials of the structure are frail and perishing, and the foundation itself is laid in the sand.

  Samuel Rogers

  Foundation, Treasure, Care

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• Necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imaginary necessities, are the greatest cozenage men can put upon the Providence of God, and make pretences to break known rules by.

  Oliver Cromwell

  Men, Law, Break

  Speech to Parliament, 12 September 1654, in Thomas Carlyle 'Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches' (1845)

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• Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty--the shame of being thought poor--it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves.

  William Cobbett

  Country, Fashion, Real

  William Cobbett (2016). “Advice to Young Men - And (Incidentally) to Young Women in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life. In a Series of Letters, Addressed to a Youth, a Bachelor, a Lover, a Husband, a Father, a Citizen, or a Subject.”, p.39, Read Books Ltd

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• How few our real wants, and how vast our imaginary ones!

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Real, Want

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• I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkiens legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

  Samantha Shannon

  Historical, Events, Culture

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