Imaginative Quotes & Sayings

I'm an artistic kind of person. I draw. I've drawn my whole life. When you have an imaginative mind, I think the artistic form manifests itself in different ways. When I was younger, I used to draw murals for people. — Vinny Guadagnino

It is not necessary to have an extravagant food budget in order to serve things with variety and tastefully cooked. It is not necessary to have expensive food on the plates before they can enter the dining room as things of beauty in colour and texture. Food should be served with real care as to the colour and texture on the plates, as well as with imaginative taste. This is where artistic talent and aesthetic expression and fulfillment come in. — Edith Schaeffer

My mind wanders terribly. I'm not wholly annoyed by my daydreaming as it has been immense use to me as regards imaginative thought, but it doesn't help when it comes to concentration. And writing needs concentration - lots of it. — Jasper Fforde

I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do. — Jonathan Demme

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

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration: - reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspirations Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. — George Eliot

There's a difference between when this happens in an artist's studio or on the tennis court versus inside the barrel of a fifty-foot wave. When you tap into that much force while pushing the absolute limits of human performance, that's more than just an imaginative breakthrough - that's bending reality to your will. — Steven Kotler

The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the categories in which that reading itself is placed - the learned social and political categories, and the physical categories into which a library is divided - constantly modify one another in ways that appear, over the years, more or less arbitrary or more or less imaginative. Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion. — Alberto Manguel

Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won't. The unmanned drone hovering over Pakistan, controlled by someone in Langley, is an apt metaphor for America's imaginative engagement with my nation. — Kamila Shamsie

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. — Robert Macfarlane

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life. — Margot Asquith

In any case, I hope that it will be a good thing when we understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't - and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves. I don't think that most people will bother with this, because they like themselves just as they are. Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves. — Marvin Minsky

[Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven. — Denis Dutton

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality ... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth ... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is. — Eugene Ionesco

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

About Anna Faktorovich's "Romances of George Sand": "What a read! Not lacking in action and very imaginative. — Belinda Jack

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

In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy. — Philip Wylie

A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct. — James G. Leyburn

Philosophy is the music of a judgmental mind and imaginative heart. — Debasish Mridha

The imaginative young vagabond quickly loses the social instincts that help to make life bearable for other men. Always he hears voices calling in the night from far-away places where blue waters lap strange shores. He hears birds singing and crickets chirping a luring roundelay. He sees the moon, yellow ghost of a dead planet, haunting the earth. — Jim Tully

Conformity is often more dangerous than war. War destroys the body but confomity destoys the imaginative mind. — Debasish Mridha

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

On the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic sub-groups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work. — C. D. Innes

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Much as being active in the antislavery movement of the last century involved more than not engaging in slavery oneself, so joining in an antiviolence movement has to go beyond opting for nonviolence in one's personal life. It calls for engaging in imaginative and forceful practices of nonviolent resistance to violence, including taking a stand toward entertainment violence. — Sissela Bok

The ear is profound, whereas the eye is frivolous, too easily satisfied. The ear is active, imaginative, whereas the eye is passive. When you hear a noise at night, instantly you imagine its cause. The sound of a train whistle conjures up the whole station. The eye can perceive only what is presented to it. — Robert Bresson

Why was it given to Darwin, less ambitious, less imaginative, and less learned than many of his colleagues, to discover the theory sought after by others so assiduously? How did it come about that one so limited intellectually and insensitive culturally should have devised a theory so massive in structure and sweeping in significance? — Robert Wright

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

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition. — Henry James

Blew it up his nose. That woman should have cards printed: 'Dr. Evan Wilson, Imaginative Medicine a Specialty. — Janet Kagan

And if I may pursue this subject farther I would suggest that the whole matter of imaginative literature depends upon this faculty of seeing the universe, from the aeonian pebble of the wayside to the raw suburban street as something new, unheard of, marvellous, finally, miraculous. The good people
amongst whom I naturally class myself
feel that everything is miraculous; they are continually amazed at the strangeness of the proportion of all things. The bad people, or scientists as they are sometimes called, maintain that nothing is properly an object of awe or wonder since everything can be explained. They are duly punished. — Arthur Machen

Movies alone have the hideous capacity to do everything for you. So in directing movies, you have to figure how to leave things out - because when you leave things out, you evoke the imaginative participation of the audience. — Alison Owen

All of this would explain why revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to re-create and reimagine everything around them. — David Graeber

I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master ... The quality that had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live. — C.S. Lewis

Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society. — Zaha Hadid

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

What, then, can we conclude about the moral value of Metallica's music? In light of our discussion, it is decidedly mixed. Insofar as it has the potential to arouse negative emotions that lead to destructive behavior, it is morally damaging. Insofar as it helps purge us of destructive emotions, it is morally beneficial. And, insofar as it engages our imaginative empathy and gets us to think more clearly and deeply about controversial issues, it is morally edifying. So, while Metallica is unquestionably a monster of a rock band, it is far from obvious that they are some kind of monster. — Robert Fudge

He could not have loved Virginia Gamely more, and he wondered if what he assumed lay at such great distance were present in this very city -or even in Virginia herself, if the future were to be fair and imaginative enough to take refuge in a single soul. — Mark Helprin

The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people. — Walter Bagehot

Form a small group. Five or six people, of people who think the way you do, and are willing to meet regularly, every week, and you will be surprised at what imaginative, gutsy thought and action comes out of that synergy. Takes a while, but there's something that every little group like that can do. — Ray McGovern

I keep trying to understand the phenomenon of why adults are so literal when children are so imaginative. Toys are a caricature of reality. — Brian Sutton-Smith

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

And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own. — Jeanette Winterson

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life. — Danielle Trussoni

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

If something doesnt feel normal to me, it must be wrong. Failing to have a shred of imaginative empathy is a virtue! — Gavin McInnes

In art the Greeks were the children of the Egyptians. The day may yet come when we shall do justice to the high powers of that mysterious and imaginative people. — Benjamin Disraeli

I definitely go through periods where I'm in a particular mood, or there's a consistent imaginative context that I feel I'm in, and I'm drawn to certain things. I can sometimes feel it when I'm moving away from something that I was once interested in - an idea or an exploration of particular relationships. I go, 'Well, I think I've done that and I don't want to do it again.' — Tom Hiddleston

MIND OF A MAN is always active and fabricating
something. Even in its hibernation, it creates imaginative
zones, arenas where it ventures whenever it has time or
will to do so". — Rashmi Singh

Of all the hot liquors, I regard buttered rum as the worst. I believe that the drinking of it should be permitted only in the "Northwest Passage" and, even there, only by highly imaginative and overenthusiastic novelists. — David A. Embury

I think of feminism as a socially just and imaginative world. — Suheir Hammad

nature is more imaginative than we are. — Lawrence M. Krauss

Over the ten years since she'd been born, the trees of Briary Swamp, West Virginia, had peered through May's window night after night. They had watched over her thoughtful brown eyes, the imaginative crook of her head, the strong character of her knobby knees. The trees had laughed at the jokes May told her cat. Their leaves had whispered over her wild inventions, her colorful stories, her drawings. — Jodi Lynn Anderson

Curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers ... Restlessness and discontent are vital things ... Intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways less intense emotions can never do. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I think I misunderstood Instagram and just thought it was people photographing their friends, and discovered there were a number of people, a number of artists, who were taking it very seriously and doing very imaginative work with Instagram as the medium. — Stephen Shore

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

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field. — Donna J. Haraway

Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own. — James W. Sire

To me reading is an almost sacred activity and the great novel is its high mass.

The novel is so deeply powerful as an art form because of the investment of time and faith it demands.

A good novel can sweep you up, quarry you out, illuminate you and truly inhabit your life.

And, of course, although the writer composes the sentences of the novel the reader is a full participant in the imaginative process and far from a mere voyeur. — Gregory Day

We should all know this: that listening is not talking; [it] is the gifted and great role and the imaginative role. And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective, and learns more and does more good. And so try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends; to those who love you and those who don't, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one. — Brenda Ueland

On this simple unit-system [of building blocks] ruled on the low table-top all these forms were combined by the child into imaginative patter. Design was recreation! ... The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the childmind to rhythmic structure in Nature - giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension. — Frank Lloyd Wright

The exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand, and this fact also contributes another proof of a more or less obvious truth - that is, that a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire. — Mario Praz

We have an education and business culture that tends to reward quick factual answers over imaginative inquiry. Questioning isn't encouraged - it is barely tolerated. — Warren Berger

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely. — Paul Theroux

Research has shown that children who play often both solitarily and socially become more creative and imaginative than those whose exposure to play and toys is limited. — Brian Sutton-Smith

Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, I write because I want more than one life. — Lee Smith

I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.
-Imagination & Community — Marilynne Robinson

Bonnie saw ropes hanging loose, poles falling away, tree-tops sinking beneath her. As they rose, the sun rose with them. Its warmth turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon midnight blue. They flew straight up. Above them, the sweet, clear music of the lonely pipe called to them. Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside. They passed straight through ... — Pauline Fisk

Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next. — Carl Lotus Becker

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets? — Jeanette Winterson

Half of what I write is imaginative reality. The other half is realized impossibilities. Blended into one, these make a fantasy. — Nicole Sager

Heaven is comfort, but it's still not living. — Alice Sebold

memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus," says Buzan. "The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. — Joshua Foer

Today, fantasy is, for better or for worse, just another genre, a place in a bookshop to find books that, too often, remind one of far too many other books; it is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative. — Neil Gaiman

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop ...
It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand. — Nelson Algren

In reality, there is a single integral community of the Earth that includes all its component members whether human or other than human. In this community every being has its own role to fulfill, its own dignity, its own inner spontaneity. Every being has its own voice. Every being declares itself to the entire universe. Every being enters into communion with other beings.

In every phase of our imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional lives we are profoundly dependent on this larger context of the surrounding world. — Thomas Berry

I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. — Kay Redfield Jamison

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination. — Ray Bradbury

I think the child I was until 12 was so much more interesting than the teenager I became. As a teenager, you get wrapped up in your friends and sexual stuff, and the imaginative life you had, it just goes. And mine was so rich and fun. Fortunately, I was able to tap back into that later on [through my books] to save my life. — Judy Blume

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its) - Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world - a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious - surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity. — Walt Whitman

The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed me does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted that we as a society have. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own. — William Empson

The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. — George Santayana

[Children] use up the same part of my head as poetry does. To deal with children is a matter of terrific imaginative identification. And the children have to come first. It's no use putting off their evening meal for two months. — Libby Houston

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever. — Sylvia Plath

Poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value. — Major Jackson

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

[W]hen the modern mythmaker, the writer of literary fairy tales, dares to touch the old magic and try to make it work in new ways, it must be done with the surest of touches. It is, perhaps, a kind of artistic thievery, this stealing of old characters, settings, the accoutrements of magic. But then, in a sense, there is an element of theft in all art; even the most imaginative artist borrows and reconstructs the archetypes when delving into the human heart. That is not to say that using a familiar character from folklore in the hopes of shoring up a weak narrative will work. That makes little sense. Unless the image, character, or situation borrowed speaks to the author's condition, as cryptically and oracularly as a dream, folklore is best left untapped. — Jane Yolen

Imaginative mind is the seed of every dream and every vision. It always starts from our minds before the manifestation. — Euginia Herlihy

If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human. — Thomas Berry

It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race - scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. — Philip Roth

I have a personal definition of cartooning, which is, simply, "imaginative drawing." Anything you're drawing that is not in front of you but is a mental construct that you want to express in a drawing is, to me, a cartoon. — Jim Woodring

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I guess a bit part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. — David Foster Wallace

[We] all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry. — Teddy Roosevelt

Dreams are the greatest imaginative power of mankind. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is sometimes less appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. — Thomas Hardy

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