Lack Of Imagination Quotes & Sayings
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Top Lack Of Imagination Quotes

People who only love once in their lives are really shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or the lack of imagination. Faithlessness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the intellectual life, - simply a confession of failure. — Oscar Wilde

I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination. — Neil Gaiman

Fear is an unavoidable element of the mortal condition. Creation in all its ravishing beauty, with its infinite baroque embellishments and subtle charms, with all the wonders that it offers from both the Maker and the made, with all its velvet mystery and with all the joy we receive from those we love here, so enchants us lack we lack the imagination, less than the faith, to envision an even more dazzling world beyond, and therefore even if we believe, we cling tenaciously to this existence, to sweet familiarity, fearful that all conceivable paradises will prove wanting by comparison. — Dean Koontz

As a writer, I see the saga of your life in a single glimpse. It may be inaccurate, but my version doesn't lack for creativity. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Try as I could - which wasn't very hard - I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't think this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something. — Julian Barnes

Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination . — Arthur Koestler

The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge, and the brake is our lack of imagination. — Julian Simon

It's a wonderful thing working with young actors. I know a lot of people don't like working with children. I actually adore it, because you watch their imagination open up and you watch them start to learn this job that I've been doing for so long. They come with such a lack of cynicism. — Michelle Forbes

How do we not rue the many unchosen paths in life? A blessed lack of imagination. There are enough real glories along any path to swamp our meager ability to picture alternatives. — Terry Rossio

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The alarming lack of ideas that is recognizable in all acts of culture, politics, organization of life, and the rest is explained by this, and the weakness of the modernist constructers of functionalist cities is only a particularly visible example of it. Intelligent specialists only ever have the intelligence to play the game of specialists: hence the fearful conformity and fundamental lack of imagination that make them admit that this or that product is useful, good, necessary. In fact, the root of the reigning lack of imagination cannot be understood if one does not have access to the imagination of lack
that is to conceiving what is absent, forbidden, and hidden, and yet possible, in modern life. — Tom McDonough

We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands of millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint ... a symphony ... but we lack the ears to hear it. — Stanislaw Lem

Common sense is usually lack of imagination, and imagination is usually lack of common sense. — Evan Esar

The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination. — Alan Watts

This was not to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some greater change, that she did not experience some of those exceptional moments when one thirsts for something other than what is, and when those who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, for something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when the heartstrings, which contentment has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, however rough, even if it should break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty won the right to indulge without let or hindrance in its own desires and woes, would gladly fling the reins into the hands of imperious circumstance, however cruel. — Marcel Proust

The only trouble with this world today lies in our lack of understanding of the power of imagination. — Napoleon Hill

There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. — Neil Gaiman

I can well imagine an athiest's last words: "White, white! L-L-Love! My God!" - and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain," and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story. — Yann Martel

Adding more people causes problems. But people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the world's progress is our stock of knowledge; the brakes are our lack of imagination and unsound social regulations of these activities. The ultimate resource is people - especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty - who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefits, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well. — Julian Simon

Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination. — Susan Ertz

While for critics of sprawl the generic signifies a loss of local identity and connection to place, for Koolhaas it represents an opportunity for reinvention and fantasy free from nostalgia or provincial habit. He admires the generic's accessibility, impermanence, economy of imagination, and malleable lack of authenticity or moralizing agenda. — Graham Owen

I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn't feeling particularly reverent about my mother's deadness, or about the vicar, but I do despise that ghastly, 'You've got to laugh, haven't you?' approach to religious occasions. As a young man, I often goaded my believing friends with crudely logical questions about God. But as the years have passed, I have found myself hankering more and more for a little cosy voodoo in my life. Increasingly, I regard my atheism as a regrettable limitation. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather, a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery: a species, in fact, of neurosis. There is no chance of my being converted, of course - it is far too late for that. But I wish it wasn't. — Zoe Heller

Too many simple green salads suffer from a lack of imagination. — James Beard

Pure honesty is a doubtful quality; it means often lack of imagination. — Virginia Woolf

Correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not just in the gulf between the salaries of CEOs and their employees but also in the high cost of education, the incredible divide between private and public schools that makes all of the fine speeches by our policy makers - most of whom send their children to private schools anyway, just as they enjoy the benefits and perks of their jobs as servants of the people - all the more insidious and insincere. — Azar Nafisi

Writer's block doesn't exist ... lack of imagination does. — Cyrese Covelli

I must say that I have always felt that, in the deepest sense, we are all brothers. Class distinctions have never meant anything to me; and hatred of tyranny is in my blood. Even as a small child I could never bear injustice of any kind. It offends my sense of the beautiful. It is so stupid and unaesthetic. I remember my feelings when I was first unjustly punished by my nurse. It wasn't the punishment itself which I resented; it was the clumsiness, the lack of imagination behind it. That, I remember, pained me very deeply. — Christopher Isherwood

Dorothy Sayers challenged the thought of many nay-sayers of her time who claimed that doctrinal preaching led to boredom and a lack of interest. She wrote: Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine - "dull dogma," as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that staggered the imagination of man - and the dogma is the drama.2 — Robert Smith Jr.

Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much. — Marcel Proust

And being alone made me want to talk to someone my own age. Someone who understood that using the "f" word wasn't a measure of my lack of imagination. Sometimes using that word just made me feel free. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM," said Owen Meany. "IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING! — John Irving

All this, grassy paddock, cows, trees - he had thought it was Nature. But now he could see that that was ignorance, or lack of imagination. It was not Nature. It was actually property. — Kate Grenville

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others. — Rebecca West

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature. — Oscar Wilde

I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination. — Nick Cave

In my personal view, a failure to discover unimagined objects and answer unasked questions, once HST functions properly, would indicate a lack of imagination in stocking the Universe on the part of the Deity. — John N. Bahcall

Most new ideas come to us not through pure logic, but through a fusion of memory and imagination. If new ideas were purely a product of rationality, other people would quickly grasp and embrace novel solutions. People's lack of imagination prevents them from comprehending the significance of an innovative idea. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I certainly know there are people in positions of power in the business who lack imagination and, perhaps as a result of that, think of me as 'David'. But I wouldn't really want to work with those people, you know? — Michael C. Hall

Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong. — Rachel Maddow

I've never taken any issue off the table for lack of suitability. Only for lack of imagination. — Garry Trudeau

The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was. — Tim Weiner

Pulp existed for 12 years before we got famous. Now, you could say that was just lack of imagination, but it's some kind of quality isn't it? Tenacity. You could also say it was sloth. — Jarvis Cocker

You're only limited by your lack of imagination and fear of appearing stupid. — Susan Messing

Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination. — John B. S. Haldane

Only people who have been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Elliot calls 'hollow men'. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. — Haruki Murakami

If we deny our awesome challenge; turn our backs on the living universe, and forsake our cosmic destiny, we will commit a crime of unutterable magnitude. Mankind alone has the power to carry out this fundamental change in the universe. Our failure would lead to consequences unthinkable. This is perhaps the first and only chance the universe will ever have to awaken from its long night and live. We are the caretakers of this delicate spark of Life. To let it flicker and die through ignorance, neglect, or lack of imagination is a horror too great to contemplate. — Marshall Savage

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures. — Oscar Wilde

So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium. — Nick Hornby

He could no longer be that Ed Larsen, but, through a lack of imagination or just sheer exhaustion, he couldn't come up with a new one, and faked his way through the days like a bad actor ... — Stewart O'Nan

In absence of consciousness, human beings would merely be animated material objects. Without the synergistic impact of consciousness, free will, and perception of a cohesive self, which act to direct human conduct, many of the qualities that we associate with our humanness would be moot or superfluous delusions including laughter and pain, memories and thoughts, love and anger, imagination and dreams. Without consciousness and free will, humankind would lack the ability to choose right from wrong and there could be no mental discipline directing each person's lifestyle, attitudes, and belief systems. — Kilroy J. Oldster

This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

Most so-called brave people lack imagination. As though they can't conceive of what would happen if something went wrong. The truly brave overcome their imagination and do what they have to do. — Charles Bukowski

Most people suffer from a lack of imagination. They don't dare enough. But I do. — Jeff Wheeler

I can't even tell you what else I imagined. I can only humiliate myself to such a degree; at a certain point it becomes humorous, and this story is not meant to be humorous. This story is meant to winch your ribs open and tamper with your heart. This story is meant to make you realize that your chances of happiness in this world are terribly slim if you lack a fine imagination. — Heidi Julavits

This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero. — Angela Carter

The imagination has a power to see into things, to feel into things, to be at one with things anew, so as to produce a new understanding of the object of the imagination.1 Indeed, those sensations and understandings that the imagination can furnish may be so detailed and vivid and complex that we simply lack the words adequately to capture them. In those circumstances, we may 'begin to realize what a huge gap there is between our understanding of what happens around us and inside us, and the words we have at our command to say something about it' (119). — Ronald Barnett

I should probably apologize for how much I swear, but fuck it. I've read that some people think swearing shows a lack of imagination and a limited vocabulary, but sometimes "darn" and "poop" and "oh heck" just don't cut it. Besides, swearing is kind of fun. — Bart Yates

The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles. — Noam Chomsky

Write what you know," my ass. Now, I'm not suggesting that you write about my ass. But although you do not, in fact, know my ass, I give you permission to write about it. And if you think you need my permission to write about my ass ("What right do I have, as a male, twenty-something, single, childfree, immigrant Indonesian Buddhist, to pretend to understand the ass of an Anglo American middle-aged married female Freethinker?") or about anything, then you lack the courage, curiosity and imagination to write good fiction, so please find something else to do. — Robyn Parnell

But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil
that is moral guilt. — Karl Jaspers

It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery. — Zoe Heller

I often wonder why people remake movies. Is there just a lack of imagination out there that they can't come up with an original idea? — Michael Beck

Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics. — E. M. Forster

Of all the major religions, or lack thereof, the atheist's is one of the best pretenders: his foundation for all existences, as well as moral behaviors for the permanent good of mankind, begins at science but ends at himself, the Napoleon complex of both intelligence and imagination. On the other hand the anti-theist wouldn't survive without a deity beyond himself to hunt. He doesn't pretend, he simply nullifies his own position. — Criss Jami

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering. — Marcel Proust

My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect
simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on with your story. — Oscar Wilde

The lack of imagination or invention most people display in naming pussies is almost beyond credence. — Carl Van Vechten

Your problem is a serious lack of imagination. You can't imagine being different than you are. — Linda Morris

The lack of magic is what leads humans to fantasize in the first place. And Alyssa, what a wonderfully powerful force an imagination can be. — A.G. Howard

Do you know what keeps poor people down, Mr. Parrish? It's not a lack of income. It's a poverty of imagination. The trailer park dreams of the suburbs, and the suburbs dreams of the city, the city dreams of the stars, so on and so forth. The poor can imagine the throne, but not being kingly. Poverty of imagination. — Maggie Stiefvater

I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted ... without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed ... The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom, or their lack of imagination — Sydney Smith

There's a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul. It's not men who limit women, it's not straights who limit gays, it's not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don't have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it. — Tom Robbins

Naomi's comin' over with some chow she got at that sushi place," Alex said. "Nice raw fish wrapped in fake seaweed." Amos groaned again. "That's not nice, Alex," Holden said. "Let the man's liver die in peace." The door to the suite slid open again, and Naomi came in carrying a tall stack of white boxes. "Food's here," she said. Alex opened all the boxes and started handing around small disposable plates. "Every time it's your turn to get food, you get salmon rolls. It shows a lack of imagination," Holden said as he began putting food on his plate. "I like salmon," Naomi replied. — James S.A. Corey

When we call it 'our' landscape, we mean it as a physical and intellectual reality. There is nothing chosen about it. This landscape is our home and we rarely stray far from it, or endure anywhere else for long before returning. This may seem like a lack of imagination or adventure, but I don't care. I love this place; for me it is the beginning and the end of everything, and everywhere else feels like nowhere. — James Rebanks

Luckily, the world is absolutely full of interesting things to do. Only lack of imagination, or lack of energy, stand in the way. Otherwise each of us could be a poet or musician, an inventor or explorer, an amateur scholar, scientist, artist, or collector. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I can't make you understand
because you don't know the meaning of fear. You have the heart of
a lion and an utter lack of imagination and I envy you both of
those qualities. You'll never mind facing realities and you'll
never want to escape from them as I do. — Margaret Mitchell

Designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart. Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought. Self-expression is never an issue, for, wittingly or unwittingly, all stories, honest and dishonest, wise and foolish, faithfully mirror their maker, exposing his humanity ... or lack of it. — Robert McKee

Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to that. 'What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!' she'd told the producer. 'Up yours - and in your ear, too! — John Irving

(Vice President) Garner has taken his personal smallness, his lack of generosity, and forged it into a political principle. He has no imagination, no convictions, and he substitutes political cynicism for social understanding. — Hamilton Basso

The true enemy of this bunch was not State Power but Lack of Imagination. — Haruki Murakami

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others. — William Faulkner

In Hollywood, the ... basic freedom of being able to choose between alternatives is absent. The gifted people who have the capacity for choice cannot exercise it; the executives who technically have the freedom of choice do not actually have it, because they usually lack the knowledge and imagination necessary for making such a choice. — Hortense Powdermaker

Character is a lack of doubt, character is stubbornly persevering in an intention no matter how senseless it is, character is a lack of imagination, character is inborn dullness, character is the misfortune of humanity. — Tadeusz Konwicki

Whether out of inertia or selfishness, whether out of fear or a simple lack of moral imagination, we so often spend our lives as if in a fog, accepting injustice, rationalizing inequity, tolerating the intolerable — Barack Obama

If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity. — Arthur Koestler

This was to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion (even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which prosperity has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue to its impulse, to renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled desires, and consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel. — Marcel Proust

For people who live in the imagination, there is no lack of subjects. To seek for the exact moment at which inspiration comes is false. Imagination floods us with suggestions all the time, from all directions. — Federico Fellini

If you don't think the wheel should be reinvented then you are suffering from the lack of creative imagination. — Matthew Donnelly

There had been times, over the past millenium, when he'd felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there's nothing we can do to them that they don't do to themselves and they do things we've never even though of, often involving electrodes. They've got what we lack. They've got imagination. And electricity, of course. — Terry Pratchett

The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream. — Oscar Wilde

Between the new, happy him, and the old, depressing him, there stood in the way only his lack of imagination. — Vann Chow

It's a great excuse and luxury, having a job and blaming it for your inability to do your own art. When you don't have to work, you are left with the horror of facing your own lack of imagination and your own emptiness. A devastating possibility when finally time is your own. — Julian Schnabel

Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the torturer. — Robert Smythe Hichens

The tiny space, the toilet, two hundred strangers just a few inches away, it's so exciting, the lack of room to maneuver, it helps if you're double-jointed. Use your imagination. Some creativity and a few simple stretching exercises and you can be knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. You'll be amazed how time flies. — Chuck Palahniuk

Major barriers to successful planning are fear of change, ignorance, uncertainty about the future, and lack of imagination. — John C. Maxwell