Imaginative Quotes - Page 17

• My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

  James Arthur

  Beautiful, Dad, Believe

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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• I like stories that exist both in the naturalistic world and in our imaginative lives, films are so immersive in that sense, we can explore how our characters think and dream, as well as how they exist in the real world.

  Dave McKean

  Dream, Real, Character

  Source: theculturalgutter.com

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• India was China's teacher in religion and imaginative literature, and the world's teacher in trignometry, quandratic equations, grammar, phonetics, Arabian Nights, animal fables, chess, as well as in philosophy, and that she inspired Boccaccio, Goethe, Herder, Schopenhauer, Emerson, and probably also old Aesop.

  Lin Yutang

  Teacher, Philosophy, Animal

  "The wisdom of China and India". Book by Lin Yutang, p. 3-4, 1942.

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• But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Teacher, Children, Pride

  Kurt Vonnegut (1973). “Breakfast of champions: or, Goodbye blue Monday!”, Dell

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• The best thing you can do for a song is to hear it on the radio and to imagine what it could mean to you and then kinda forget the words. Just imagine how you felt when you heard it, if it was one of your songs. If it became one of your songs. If it meant whatever it meant for you and as soon as you see the visual, you get a rapid eye movement relationship with the song instead of an imaginative one. I think that can be dangerous because I don't think I'd want to be listening to a song on the radio and thinking about the video. Whatever that one interpretation was

  Ric Ocasek

  Song, Mean, Eye

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• Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Horizon, Utopia, Guides

  Isaiah Berlin (2013). “The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas”, p.15, Princeton University Press

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• Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Reality, Choices

  Aldous Huxley (1955). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• It is characteristic of the barbarian ... to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Mean, Men, Giving

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• It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason--that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved.

  Cecil Day-Lewis

  Exercise, Science, Discovery

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• Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.

  Walter Pater

  Eye, Creativity, Exercise

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• Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction.

  David Brin

  Character, Doe, Fiction

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• Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Children, Men, Soul

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• ... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Truth, Years, Two

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• For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Imagination, Creative

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.63, Oxford University Press, USA

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• It is only my eye that has helped me. I am still hopeless with that thing called a scale ruler. I love color, but that comes very naturally to me. From the beginning, I never followed trends. If I was aware of them, I didn't care, for I believed as I do now, that rooms should be timeless and very personal. I don't set out to achieve a particular style. And I certainly don't have a 'look' - just a mishmash of everything that somehow, by instinct, usually turns out to be a warm imaginative, 'living room'.

  Sister Parish

  Eye, Color, Style

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• The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith.

  William Saroyan

  Children, Race, Healthy

  William Saroyan (1968). “My heart's in the Highlands”

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• The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.

  Walter Pater

  Creativity, Exercise, Imagination

  Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance”, p.113, Simon and Schuster

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• An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

  Samuel Beckett

  Art, Adventure, Imagination

  Samuel Beckett, Ruby Cohn (1983). “Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment”, Calder Publications Limited

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• Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting.

  Vera Rubin

  Uplifting, Science, Demand

  "Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters". Book by Vera Rubin, 1997.

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• It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Men, Discovery

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• I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

  Alan Lightman

  Writing, Our World, Long

  ""Mr g," by Alan Lightman". Interview with Jeff Glor, www.cbsnews.com. January 24, 2012.

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• And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.

  Stephen King

  Dream, Nuts, People

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• A culture is as rich and as capable of surviving as it has imaginative artists, skilled men of science, a high ethic level, workable government, land and natural resources, in about that order of importance.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Men, Artist, Land

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• They [the Hardscrabbles]never enjoyed it when adults playfully lied to them. The adults always think they're being amusing and imaginative, just like children. But kids never lie playfully. They lie as if their lives depended on it.

  Ellen Potter

  Children, Lying, Kids

  Ellen Potter (2010). “The Kneebone Boy”, p.81, Macmillan

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• Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music.

  Julia Child

  Drawing, People, Justice

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