Imaginal Quotes & Sayings

I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp
brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure. — Anne Carson

Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar's immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar's immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly.

The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and alliances built among those engaged in them. — Elisabet Sahtouris

Why should anything exist at all, you might ask?
Existence didn't just spring out of nothing whatsoever. Even if there was a time of No-Thingness, then there must have been an inherent or precursory realm of possibility; a possibility that something
anything
such as the imaginal, might exist.
Why are we here at all? Because this was a possibility, and we are the living proof that there must have been such a possibility. So, you might say that existence, in one form or another, was even more than more likely, it was inevitable. — Etienne De L'Amour

The process of falling apart (the Coyolxauhqui process), of being wounded, is a sort of shamanic initiatory dismemberment that gives suffering a spiritual and soulful value. The shaman's initiatory ordeal includes some type of death or dismemberment during the ecstatic trance journey. Torn apart into basic elements and then reconstructed, the shaman acquires the power of healing and returns to help the community. To be healed we must be dismembered, pulled apart. The healing occurs in disintegration, in the demotion of the ego as the self's only authority.20 By connecting with our wounding, the imaginal journey makes it worthwhile. Healing images bring back the pieces, heal las rajaduras. As Hillman notes, healing is a deep change of attitude that involves an adjustment and abandonment of "ego-heroics." It requires that we shift our perspective. La — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Your reactions, whether positive or negative, are creative of future circumstances. In your imagination, you can hear words congratulating you on getting a wonderful new job. That imaginal act now goes forward and you will encounter this pleasant experience in the future. — Neville Goddard

Still, in this book, we will treat the chakras as if they are actual components of a subtle body, even as we leave the overarching question of their existential status (physical? psychical? imaginal? fictitious?) unanswered. This agnostic approach means that you don't actually have to believe in the literal reality of chakras to get something out of this book and start working with the chakra system. If — Tai Morello

The limitation upon this mode of promoting peace lies in the fact that it consists in an appeal to the civilized side of man, while war is the product of forces proceeding from man's original savage nature. — Elihu Root

You cannot persist in wanting what you already have. If you assume you are what you desire to be to the point of ecstasy, you no longer want it. Your imaginal act is as much a creative act as a physical one wherein man halts, shrinks and is blessed, for as man creates his own likeness, so does your imaginal act transform itself into the likeness of your assumption. If, however, you do not reach the point of satisfaction, repeat the action over and over again until you feel as though you touched it and virtue went out of you. — Neville Goddard

It is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night. — Edna O'Brien

What we love teaches us how to love. — Renee Coleman

Life is too short to waste time hating anyone. — Regina Brett

It was essential to do this job, hateful though it was, because we knew the Germans were hot on the trail. — Mark Oliphant

I detected sarcoma." He put his finger on his neck. "Right here."
The other man nodded
his head seemed to be nodding continually
and muttered:
"Yes. There's no possibility of operating."
"Of course not," said the old specialist, his eyes shining with a kind of sinister irony. "There's only one thing that could remove it
the guillotine. — Henri Barbusse

What is time? How is it measured? Why do we measure it? What is its purpose?
-Mr. Ludwig — S.L. Whyte

Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path leading to some imaginal bliss. The meditative mind is seeing, watching, listening, without the word, without comment, without opinion, attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout the day. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

I watched this documentary on Madonna. I remember I grew up hearing she wanted to rule the world. Actually, she worked really hard - really, really hard. — Winona Ryder

My art has always been in response to visions. Rather than confine my subject to representations of the outer worlds, I include portrayals of the multi-dimensional imaginal realms that pull us toward consciousness evolution. — Alex Grey

Again, we can see the importance of imaginal practices such as journals, dream work, poetry, painting, and therapy aimed at exploring images in dream and life. These methods keep us actively engaged in the mythologies that are the stuff of our own lives. The — Thomas Moore

I am, as it were, the created creating - a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages. — Sol Luckman