Imaginative Quotes

• The Imaginative Child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization

  L. Frank Baum

  Children, Men, Civilization

  L. Frank Baum (2016). “THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ – Complete Collection: 16 Novels in One Premium Edition (Fantasy Classics Series): The most Beloved Children’s Books about the Adventures in the Magical Land of Oz”, p.1598, e-artnow

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• Imagination is more important than knowledge.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Positive, Leadership

  Albert Einstein (2015). “Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything from the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century”, p.32, St. Martin's Press

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• You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

  Mark Twain

  Life, Inspiring, Meaningful

  Mark Twain (1889). “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”, p.422, Createspace Independent Pub

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• Too much reality in a picture is always a disappointment to the imaginative soul. We love suggestion and not hard facts.

  John F. Carlson

  Disappointment, Reality, Soul

  John F. Carlson (2013). “Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting”, p.118, Courier Corporation

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• Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

  Cecil Beaton

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

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• It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Imagination, Literature, Facts

  1841 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', in the Gentleman's Magazine, Apr.

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• Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Communication, Plain Language, Imagination

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2001). “On the Constitution of the Church and State”, p.326, Classic Books Company

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• If you have never failed at anything, then you haven't been trying hard enough, aren't very imaginative, or have had such extraordinarily good luck that you have come to believe you are invincible.

  Margaret Heffernan

  Believe, Good Luck, Trying

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• The creative consequences of man's imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories.

  Anthony Storr

  Men, Creative, May

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• With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.

  Ray Bradbury

  School, Intellectual, Swimmer

  Ray Bradbury (2012). “Fahrenheit 451: A Novel”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

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• The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury, and wrong pass before their minds,--efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon.

  Arthur Helps

  Drama, Passion, People

  Sir Arthur Helps (1871). “Brevia: Short Essays and Aphorisms”, p.94

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• Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Kings, War, Heaven

  "Sartor Resartus: The Historian".

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• Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Science, Ruins, Shame

  1953 'The Sense of Human Dignity', lecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 19 Mar.

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• It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

  Gore Vidal

  Birthday, Believe, Exercise

  Encounter Dec. 1967, "French Letters: Theories of the New Novel"

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• Consistency is the last refuge of the unimagininative.

  Oscar Wilde

  Imagination Creativity, Consistency, Oscars

  Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit (1946)

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• One of the sad realities today is that very few people, especially young people, read books. Unless we can find imaginative ways of addressing this reality, future generations are in danger of losing their history.

  Nelson Mandela

  Book, Reality, People

  Nelson Mandela (2011). “Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations”, p.326, Pan Macmillan

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• We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.

  George Eliot

  Inspirational, Ignorance, Imagination

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.588, Wordsworth Editions

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• We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious... and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

  Walt Disney

  Life, Moving On, Moving Forward

  "Meet the Robinsons". The ending credits of the movie, 2007.

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• Curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

  Walt Disney

  Moving On, Moving Forward, Next Move

  "Meet the Robinsons". The ending credits of the movie, 2007.

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• Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Philosophy, Science, Secret

  ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD (1925). “SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD”

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• Nothing is real beyond imaginative patterns men make of reality.

  William Blake

  Real, Men, Patterns

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• Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

  Fred D'Aguiar

  Visualizing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• And it’s only by going nowhere - by sitting still or letting my mind relax - that I find that the thoughts that come to me unbidden are far fresher and more imaginative than the ones I consciously seek out.

  Pico Iyer

  Sitting Still, Mind, Relax

  Pico Iyer (2014). “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere”, p.62, Simon and Schuster

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• To argue that we humans are capable of complex multifarious thought and feeling, whereas the sheep's perception is probably limited by lowly sheepish perceptions, is no more to the point than if I were to slaughter and eat you on the grounds that I am a sophisticated personality able to enjoy Mozart, formal logic and cannibalism, whereas your imaginative world seems confined to True Romances and tinned spaghetti.

  Brigid Brophy

  Animal, Sheep, Personality

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• Contrary to slanderous Eastern opinion, much of Iowa is not flat, but rolling hills country with a lot of timber, a handsome and imaginative landscape, crowded with constant small changes of scene and full of little creeks winding with pools where shiners, crappies and catfish hover.

  Paul Engle

  Country, Small Changes, Iowa

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