Imagination Quotes - Page 27

• Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.

  Robert Hass

  Revenge, Military, Taken

  Robert Hass (2007). “Time and materials: poems, 1997-2005”, HarperCollins

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• Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been to, discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age - Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds. No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds.

  Tad Williams

  Real, Thinking, Animal

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• Nature has no outline. Imagination has.

  William Blake

  Outlines

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• He who perceives in the spiritual world must know that at times Imaginations are assigned to him which at first he must forego understanding; he must receive them as Imaginations and let them ripen in his soul as such. In spiritual experience, much depends on a man having the patience to make observations, at first to simply accept them, and to wait with understanding them until the right moment arrives.

  Rudolf Steiner

  Spiritual, Men, Waiting

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• The imaginations excited by the view of an unknown and untravelled wilderness are not such as arise in the artificial solitude of parks and gardens... The phantoms which haunt a desert are want, and misery, and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon the thoughts; man is made unwillingly acquainted with his own weakness, and meditation shows him only how little he can sustain, and how little he can perform.

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Garden, Views

  Samuel Johnson (1824). “Works: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.255

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• The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Men, Whole

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1971). “Ringside Seats”

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• The only trouble with this world today lies in our lack of understanding of the power of imagination.

  Napoleon Hill

  Lying, Understanding, World

  Dr. Robert C. Worstell, editor, Napoleon Hill “Law of Success - Law of Attraction”, Lulu.com

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• We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves.

  David Whyte

  Pain, Distance, Taken

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• They would make the 'Church ' their great meeting-point, rather than the Atonement of Christ. As far as my experience goes, they have more devoutness and less devotion, more fear and less love, more feeling of duty than of desire, laying more stress on Phil. ii. 12 than ver. 13, and in practice working upon the intellect and imagination rather than aiming at the heart, skirmishing among the outworks rather than assaulting the citadel.

  Frances Ridley Havergal

  Stress, Heart, Practice

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• In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy, and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside of our own heads.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, Ambition, Past

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• When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won't do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years - the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.

  Brenda Ueland

  Years, Creative, Slumps

  Brenda Ueland (2013). “If You Want to Write”, p.22, Simon and Schuster

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• Our reading can affect our imaginations in ways of which we are not consciously aware. It is quite common...to re-read something after a gap of many years and realize that it has been there all along, without any memory of where it was first encountered. But it may have been working away all the time.

  Tom Shippey

  Memories, Reading, Years

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• Anyone with great imagination, of course, is intuitive. Knowledge of any nature, unless put into practical use, becomes of little effect.

  Edgar Cayce

  Use, Littles, Practicals

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• Time spent with children is time well spent. Their little minds are not constrained by 'reality' or focused upon goals. Anything and everything is possible. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

  Carl Sagan

  Children, Reality, Goal

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• [T]hese last few days where I've moped around damn near depressed for real, because of people who do not exist. Not really. I can buy them Christmas presents, but there is no way to send them. Sometimes I feel like I should be able to walk into the next room and there they will be, but they won't. These people do not exisit as flesh and blood, but there are different kinds of reality, and there are days when imagination feels very, very real.

  Laurell K. Hamilton

  Real, Blood, People

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• If worldviews or metanarratives can be compared to lenses, which of them brings things into the sharpest focus? This is not an irrational retreat from reason. Rather, it is about grasping a deeper order of things which is more easily accessed by the imagination than by reason.

  Alister E. McGrath

  Order, Focus, Lenses

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• The popular Arab imagination is a pliant and inventive thing; it can explain any defeat. It is a compass that always points toward the Jew.

  James Lileks

  Defeat, Compass, Jew

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• There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But he still says so. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida. But he still says so. And thus, gripping firmly these figments of his own imagination, Mr. Cheney lives on, in defiance, and spreads - around him and before him - darkness, like some contagion of fear. They are never wrong, and they never regret - admirable in a French torch singer, cataclysmic in an American leader.

  Keith Olbermann

  Regret, Iraq, Mass Destruction

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• The din of politicians speechifying about the war, the faux moral posturing of opinion-makers who claim to speak in the name of 'the troops,' everything that Iraq has come to represent in the American imagination - it all melts away in the 115-degree heat. What's left is the machinery of a war that, having been called into being by civilians, no longer bears a relation to anything they say.

  Lawrence Kaplan

  War, Names, Iraq

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• Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.

  Camille Paglia

  Sex, Political, May

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.41, Canongate Books

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• People read a lot of stories about witches, fairies, paranormals, and children possessed by evil spirits. They go to films showing rituals featuring pentagrams, swords, and invocations. That's fine, people need to give free reign to their imagination and to go through certain stages. Anyone who gets through those stages without being deceived will eventually get in touch with the Tradition.

  Paulo Coelho

  Children, People, Evil

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• At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it-it will haunt you till it's written.

  Truman Capote

  Notebook, Ideas, Stories

  Truman Capote, M. Thomas Inge (1987). “Truman Capote: Conversations”, p.30, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.

  Wayne McGregor

  Want, Influence, Currents

  "Royal Ballet Live: Wayne Mcgregor on Dance, the White Stripes and the Web". Interview with Laura Barnett, www.theguardian.com. March 21, 2012.

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• This kind of totalization of security consciousness [after tragedy of 9/11] has the effect within classrooms (and beyond) of constraining the imagination and reinforcing attitudes that privilege the forces of law and order as against the crosscurrents of freedom and dissent.

  Richard A. Falk

  Attitude, Order, Law

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• What is distinctive about the U.S. is that higher education is under attack not because it is failing but because it is public. It is now considered dangerous because it has the potential to function as a site where a culture of questioning can operate, the imagination can blossom, and difficult questions can be openly debated and critically engaged.

  Henry Giroux

  Difficult Questions, Culture, Failing

  "Higher Education Under Attack: An Interview With Henry A. Giroux". Interview with C. Cryn Johannsen, www.truth-out.org. April 22, 2011.

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