Imaginative Quotes - Page 10

• The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

  Gerald Brenan

  Race, Poetry, Literature

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• Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.

  Bede Griffiths

  Reality, Vision, Adequate

  Bede Griffiths (2004). “Bede Griffiths: Essential Writings”

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• ...I believe, with Gandhi, that we need to take an imaginative leap forward toward fresh and generous idealism for the sake of all humanity - that we neeed to renew this ancient wisdom of nonviolence, to strive for a disarmed world, and to create a culture of nonviolence.

  Mairead Corrigan

  Wisdom, Believe, Humanity

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• Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes.

  Honore de Balzac

  Moving, Men, Wish

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• I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of a scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.

  J. G. Ballard

  Art, Knowledge, Science

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• When faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice... As I learned during my liberal arts education, any symbol can have, in the imaginative context, two versions, a positive and a negative... If you spill your milk you're left with a glass which is either half empty or half full... You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.

  Margaret Atwood

  Inspirational, Graduation, Art

  "Attitude". Margaret Atwood's commencement address at the University of Toronto, Canada, www.humanity.org. June 14, 1983.

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• The amount of financial and imaginative energy that's put into mediocrity is just amazing, which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being.

  William Hurt

  Inspiration, Energy, Mediocrity

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• In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Religious, Talking, Years

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.378

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• Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.

  Robert Hewison

  Teamwork, Country, Museums

  Robert Hewison (1987). “The heritage industry: Britain in a climate of decline”, Methuen

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• Alan Rocke's Image and Reality does so many things vividly and convincingly: it shows how visual images led chemistry step by step to the reality of the microscopic world; how simple portrayals of the logic of substitution and combination were reified; brings to our attention the imaginative, neglected work of Williamson and Kopp; and takes a critical look at Kekule's daydream. And it beautifully delineates the essential place the imagination has in science. A rewarding, lively picture of chemistry in formation.

  Roald Hoffmann

  Simple, Reality, Imagination

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• Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

  Margaret Mahy

  Reading, Writing, Different

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• The only valid reason to use clichés is in the speech of a character. Cliches are indications of sloppy writing. The writer does not respect the scene he is trying to dramatize enough to fashion it through precise prose and imaginative imagery. From the book Dare to be a Great Writer: 329 Keys to Powerful Fiction by

  Leonard Bishop

  Fashion, Powerful, Book

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• Science and religion are very much alike. Both are imaginative and creative aspects of the human mind. The appearance of a conflict is a result of ignorance. We come to exist through a divine act. That divine guidance is a theme throughout our life; at our death the brain goes, but that divine guidance and love continues. Each of us is a unique, conscious being, a divine creation. It is the religious view. It is the only view consistent with all the evidence.

  John Eccles

  Religious, Ignorance, Unique

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• Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.

  Edwin Muir

  Character, Reality, Literature

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• For me, the world of nature bears spectacular witness to the imaginative genius of our Creator.

  Philip Yancey

  Genius, World, Bears

  Philip Yancey (1995). “Finding God in Unexpected Places”, Ballantine Books

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• SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.

  M. John Harrison

  Fun, Opportunity, Imagination

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• If you're an enthusiast and you love the world like I do, it comes naturally. But I think charity must become more fun to give, more interactive and imaginative.

  Joanna Lumley

  Fun, Thinking, Giving

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• We need imagination in programming, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free.

  Newton N. Minow

  Creativity, People, Imagination

  Television and the Public Interest, delivered 9 May 1961, National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, DC

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• The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

  Richard Louv

  Sports, Children, Exercise

  Richard Louv (2013). “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”, p.44, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.

  James Hillman

  Struggle, Character, Fate

  James Hillman (2012). “The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life”, p.11, Ballantine Books

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• Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Literature History, Creative, Insight

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• The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Mean, Poetry, Understanding

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• The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Airplane, Science, Discovery

  Alfred North Whitehead (2010). “Process and Reality”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

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• I get imaginative with a mouth full of adjectives,
  A brain full of adverbs, and a box full of laxatives,
  Shittin' on rappers, causin' hospital accidents.

  Eminem

  Rap, Hip Hop, Brain

  Song: Still Don't Give a Fuck

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• It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

  Northrop Frye

  Essence, Culture, Limits

  Northrop Frye (2015). “Anatomy of Criticism”, p.127, Princeton University Press

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