Imaginative Quotes - Page 5

• The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

  Northrop Frye

  Philosophy, Literature, Mythology

  Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham (2003). “Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts”, p.158, University of Toronto Press

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• As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute.The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up.These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.

  Bruce Sterling

  Morning, Philosophical, Loss

  "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole". Talk at Long Now Foundation, 2004.

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• In our time ... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.

  Chaim Potok

  Passion, Winning, Men

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• Halloween's coming. Kids get very imaginative in my neighborhood. Last year, three kids showed up as Goldman Sachs executives and demanded 4.5 billion pieces of candy.

  Jay Leno

  Halloween, Kids, Years

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• The imagination is the medium of appreciation in every field. The engagement of the imagination is the only thing that makes any activity more than mechanical. Unfortunately, it is too customary to identify the imaginative with the imaginary, rather than with a warm and intimate taking in of the full scope of a situation.

  John Dewey

  Appreciation, Imagination, Engagement

  John Dewey (2004). “Democracy and Education”, p.226, Courier Corporation

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• The arts, like language, emerged spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value.

  Denis Dutton

  Art, Survival, Intellectual

  Denis Dutton (2009). “The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution”, p.5, Oxford University Press, USA

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• One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.

  Edward Hopper

  Art, Color, Design

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• I found so-called great art too pompous, too stiff. What at this time was called minor art was freer, more imaginative, more open to all kinds of unorthodox expression, all kinds of daring in the handling of materials, and I preferred to surround myself with this type of art than with the great collectors' pieces. I had always in my mind that I was collecting for learning.

  Jacques Lipchitz

  Art, Greatness, Expression

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• I'm not good at standing on platforms and persuading people to my political point of view. Nor would I seek to. My gift is completely different. It's for presenting an imaginative version of the world which I hope people would recognize and be affected by.

  David Hare

  Views, People, Political

  "New Again: David Hare". Interview with Kathleen Tynan, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 29, 2015.

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• It's actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self. The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self ... Imaginative people have messier minds.

  Scott Barry Kaufman

  Self, People, Creative

  "18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently" by Carolyn Gregoire, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 4, 2014.

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• It is all very well to say that children are happier with mud pies and rag dolls than with these elaborate delights. There may be something in this theory, but when their amusements are carried to such a point of luxurious and imaginative perfection it certainly gives them great and even unlimited enjoyment at the time.

  Ada Leverson

  Children, Pie, Giving

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• The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.

  Alain de Botton

  Hints, May, Matter

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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• The intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power.

  George Henry Lewes

  Artist, Vision, Tests

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Principles of Success in Literature”

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• What people think about you is not supposed to matter much, so long as you yourself know where the truth lies; but I have found out, as have others who move in and out of newspaper headlines, that on occasion it can matter a good deal. For once you enter the world of headlines you learn there is not one truth but two: the one which you know from the facts; and the one which the public, or at any rate a highly imaginative part of the public, acquires by osmosis.

  Richard E. Byrd

  Lying, Moving, Thinking

  Richard E. Byrd (2003). “Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure”, p.8, Island Press

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• People who get Nobel prizes aren't necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work.

  Aaron Klug

  People, Sometimes, Nobel

  Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Interview, library.cshl.edu. June 17, 2005.

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• [Opera] does not call so much for an imaginative ear as for an imaginative eye, an eye which can see beyond little absurdities toward great truths.

  George Richard Marek

  Eye, Doe, Ears

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• If an artist and a scientist have a common point, it is probably in the need for some kind of imaginative thinking to interpret the material they have.

  Catherine Yass

  Artist, Thinking, Needs

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• One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.

  George Jean Nathan

  Men, Doe, Looks

  George Jean Nathan (1972). “The Critic and the Drama”, p.55, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

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• It is imperative when flying coach that you restrain any tendency toward the vividly imaginative. For although it may momentarily appear to be the case, it is not at all likely that the cabin is entirely inhabited by crying babies smoking inexpensive domestic cigars.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Baby, Smoking, Flying

  Fran Lebowitz (1994). “The Fran Lebowitz Reader”, Vintage

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• I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.

  Virginia Woolf

  Believe, Expression, Don't Believe

  Virginia Woolf (1975). “The letters of Virginia Woolf”

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• When we hate a person, with an intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or sympathize -- any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create some sort of sympathy.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Strong, Hate, Imagination

  Charles Horton Cooley (1992). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.159, Transaction Publishers

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• Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Real, War, Thinking

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• I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

  Jan Morris

  Spiritual, Believe, Sexuality

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• Whether the poet is living or dead, they're part of our imaginative community.

  Joan Larkin

  Community, Poet

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. October 25, 2013.

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• If plants could be credited with reasoning powers, we would marvel at the imaginative ways they bribe or ensnare other creatures to carry out their wishes.

  Jane Goodall

  Wish, Way, Plant

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