Real And Imaginary Quotes & Sayings

Human hypocrisy: When one judges humanity as a whole, people have the habit of disagreeing, saying that everyone is different - unique. Yet people turn around and say that at the end of the day, everyone is the same. Ladies and gentlemen, the joyful paradoxical nature of humanity. If you really want to dismiss the paradox, show me that your an imaginary number, rather than a real number. — Lionel Suggs

Today we often use deadlines - real and imaginary - to imprison ourselves. — Arianna Huffington

It's queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty! — Anne Sullivan

Rebellion against technology and civilization is real rebellion, a real attack on the values of the existing system. But the green anarchists, anarcho-primitivists, and so forth (The "GA Movement") have fallen under such heavy influence from the left that their rebellion against civilization has to great extent been neutralized. Instead of rebelling against the values of civilization, they have adopted many civilized values themselves and have constructed an imaginary picture of primitive societies that embodies these civilized values. — Theodore Kaczynski

Stanley forced a smile to his lips at the memory of the onesided romance; it was silly, after all, a stupid childhood crush. Who'd fall in love with a fictional character? That was the kind of thing you laughed about as an adult. Or at least Harriet had thought so. He couldn't quite do it, though. Couldn't quite see it as a joke. It had felt too real, too raw and wild and fierce, for him to
dismiss it even now. It was love, of a sort, stunted and unformed as it was. For a time, it had kept him sane. — Amelia Mangan

It's strange how dreams get under your skin and give your heart a test for what's real and what's imaginary. — Jason Mraz

History deals with situations and figures not imaginary but real. It demands therefore a combination of qualities unnecessary to the poet or writer of romance - glacial judgment coupled with fervent sympathy. The poet may be an uninspired illiterate, the romance-writer an uninspired hack. Under no circumstances can either of them be accused of wrongdoing or deceiving the public, however incongruous their efforts. They write well or badly, and there the matter ends. The historian, who fails in his duty, deceives the reader and wrongs the dead. — Norman Douglas

Semantics ... is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions of being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense — Alfred Tarski

Of course for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary - just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners like Willing's mother thought money was real. Because the work was real, and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer. — Lionel Shriver

Unicorns are real and emo is imaginary. — Mikey Way

When dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the poets among us can be "literalists of the imagination"
above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," shall we have it. — Marianne Moore

The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space ... In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic. — Rebecca Solnit

We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are. — Blaise Pascal

There are enough real enemies and threats in the world without having to invent imaginary ones. — Christina Engela

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that it has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are of such a nature. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. — Cesare Beccaria

I was a real daydreamer at school, gazing out of the window and losing myself in imaginary worlds. — Talulah Riley

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill. — Barbara Kingsolver

What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention. — Javier Marias

It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
— Nicola Chiaromonte

BEECH
Where my imaginary line
Bends square in woods an iron spine
And pile of real rocks have been founded.
And off this corner in the wild,
Where these are driven in and piled,
One tree, by being deeply wounded,
Has been impressed as Witness Tree
And made commit to memory
My proof of being not unbounded.
Thus truth's established and borne out,
Though circumstanced with dark and doubt
Though by a world of doubt surrounded. — Robert Frost

But primitive man had enemies real as well as imaginary, and they were not subject to priestly sorceries. — Paul Harris

You want to know how to stop this killer? Forgive yourself, and he'll
disappear from your life forever."
"Thanks. I'll be sure to do that."
And I know:
1. This is almost the same conversation I've had with myself many times
before.
2. Gordon's only trying to help.
But it doesn't matter.
I:
1. Say, "See you later."
2. Step outside.
3. Close the door.
I don't want to, really. I want to go back inside and believe Gordon's words,
like a child believing in a fairy tale, and I want to escape this nightmare forever.
But I can't.
I realize now that it's easy to tell the difference between a real problem and
an imaginary one.
It's just the terror of facing the truth that's hard. — Jeremy C. Shipp

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly. — Laura Miller

Without the reference points of pleasure and pain, people invent imaginary and abstract standards for ethics that are divorced from reality and generate vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. Pleasure is the only real ethical guide. It returns our conversations about ethics to the natural context where these conversations belong: the well-being of sentient beings. — Hiram Crespo

To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. — Simone Weil

Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend. — Alison Gopnik

This [oatmeal] represents your soul in its pure state. Your soul on the day you were born. You were perfect. You were happy. You were good.
Now, enter Concept Number Two: crap. Don't worry, folks. I don't use actual crap up here. Only imaginary crap. You'll have to supply the crap, using your mind. Now, if someone came up and crapped in your nice warm oatmeal, what would you say? Would you say: 'Wow, super, thanks, please continue crapping in my oatmeal'? Am I being silly? I'm being a little silly. But guess what, in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time
friends, co-workers, loved ones, even you kids, especially your kids!
and that's exactly what you do. You say, 'Thanks so much!' You say, 'Crap away!' You say, and here the metaphor breaks down a bit, 'Is there some way I can help you crap in my oatmeal? — George Saunders

There is an implicit recognition here that important things in life are not always immediately visible, and can't always be named, or even fully understood. Others still are entirely imaginary
like a red tree growing suddenly in a room
although this does not make them any less real. — Shaun Tan

She thinks, I failed twice. If I failed twice I'm going to fail forever. No! That is not the law of life. If you failed twice that means you can learn. It's just a learning experience. It's an obstacle. An imaginary obstacle. She made it real. She made failing a journey of life ... Instead do again and make a journey of your life. — Cesar Millan

Pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary. — Jean Baudrillard

There are in life real evils enough and it is folly to afflict ourselves with imaginary ones. — Benjamin Franklin

President Obama admitted this week that a former girlfriend that he wrote about in his autobiography was made up and not a real person ... So Obama had an imaginary girlfriend. Big deal! He had an imaginary economic plan. It's all the same. — Jay Leno

Our real nature is not our imaginary, limited ego. Our true nature is vast, all-comprehensive, and intangible as empty space. — Anagarika Govinda

Except for that stuff about the barnacle peckers that was some of the boringest shit I've heard since school got out." I couldn't even look at him. "Cheer up," he said. "I brought some real entertainment." He pulled a brittle copy of The Godfather from his backpack and started reading some scene that began on page twenty-seven - he knew the sexy page numbers by heart - in which some imaginary woman described how big this imaginary Sonny was to — Jim Lynch

Up till a minute ago it felt so real, but now it seems imaginary. Just a few steps is all it takes for everything associated with it to lose all sense of reality. And me
the person who was there until a moment ago
now I seem imaginary too. — Haruki Murakami

Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty
the shame of being thought poor
it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves. — William Cobbett

I believe that the infinite and mysterious charm that lies in the contemplation of a moving vessel is caused, firstly, by the regularity and symmetry that are among the primordial needs of the human spirit, to the same degree as complication and harmony - and, secondly, by the multiplication and generation of all the imaginary curves and figures produced in space by the real elements of the object. The poetic idea released by this operation of movement in the lines is the hypothesis of a being that is vast, immense, complicated but eurythmic, an animal full of genius, suffering and sighing all the sighs and all the human ambitions. — Charles Baudelaire

Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. — George Washington

A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences. — Jean Baudrillard

They would always be here, she realized. Always. Day in, day out. They had lives of their own, lives that would be the same day after day into perpetuity, and yet they'd chosen to make themselves into what was essentially the furniture of other people's realities. These, she thought, were people without dreams, and she wondered what had happened to cut those dreams out and leave them hollow carriers of nothing but a feeble need to see something more in the mindless kick of a ball down the field. She'd once thought it was imaginary value, the way they watched this. But it wasn't imaginary. It was real, when it was the only thing that let them feel like there was still some bright spark left in them. That had value, if only to them. That meant something. — Cole McCade

[Cindy Sherman's] photographs reverse the terms of art and autobiography. They use art not to reveal the artist's true self but to show the self as an imaginary construct. There is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; there are only the guises she assumes. And she does not create these guises; she simply chooses them in the way that any of us do. — Douglas Crimp

Real atheist is not the one that does not believe in an imaginary big monkey, but the one that gives the imagination more importance than the reality. — Abhijit Naskar

There is always a real and an imaginary person you are in love with; sometimes you love one best, sometimes the other. — Anthony Powell

The recognition of his carelessness filled Mr. Lecky with fear and anger. In the dusk his eerie heart could anticipate the hours of terror which he had laid up for himself. Sounds, real or imaginary, the silences and secrets of the night, the working of his own mind, skilled in cruel illusion and rich in evil fancy, would find him without recourse. — James Gould Cozzens

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world. — Virginia Woolf

This 'flying saucer' situation is not at all imaginary or seeing too much in some natural phenomena. Something is really flying around. The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious. — Nathan Farragut Twining

Pride is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what would have others think of us. — Jane Austen

I believe in numbers. The ones you can see and the ones you can't. The real and the imaginary, the rational and the irrational, and every point on lines that go on forever. Numbers have never let me down. They don't waffle. They don't lie. They don't pretend to be what they're not. They're timeless. — Amy Harmon

The character of instrumental music ... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations. — Franz Liszt

He felt a psychosomatic rush of emptiness before he spoke. "Since we are getting to the real point, I am not stupid John. And it would be foolish to think me ignorant. Isn't this about the Science Nation interview? Isn't this because I mistakenly used the word "soul?" Isn't this about you and the others thinking somewhere along the lines, I had gained an imaginary soul? We all know when you gain a soul, you lose a mind. Don't we john?"
John hesitated briefly staring at Roma. "I believe so yes. Souls are luxuries for speculative minds. Real scientists can't afford such luxuries. They have the world to save."
Roma narrowed his eyes. "Or destroy. — Dew Platt

All the theories that acting is reacting to imaginary circumstances as though they are real, and directing is turning psychology into behavior, those are all stabs at something that can't be taught. All the great actors can't talk about what they do, and they don't want to begin to talk about it. They just do it. — Mike Nichols

But [he] had lost god, and all his family and friends were staying behind with his imaginary friend. A silly dream goes away and takes with it your whole real life. — Penn Jillette

Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, ... some lies can be true, ... broken faith may be restored. — Joanne Harris

Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else in some other way, in some other world; weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that's what eternity is. It's not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it's also the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self. — Pessoa, Fernando

We were deluged together in the raw, unbalanced Stuff of the universe. Inevitable consequence:
My own little reification.
I was made flesh, and in the process taken from him. I was never supposed to be real. How terrifying to confide your every doubt to an imaginary companion, to bequeath to him every alternative, and then one day turn and see him standing before you. Gonzo must be feeling so hollow inside, with me spun out and separated from him. It must be quiet and empty in there.
And that, of course, is how I survived being shot. Freshly minted, new, I wasn't real enough to die. — Nick Harkaway

One might think this means that imaginary numbers are just a mathematical game having nothing to do with the real world. From the viewpoint of positivist philosophy, however, one cannot determine what is real. All one can do is find which mathematical models describe the universe we live in. It turns out that a mathematical model involving imaginary time predicts not only effects we have already observed but also effects we have not been able to measure yet nevertheless believe in for other reasons. So what is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds? — Stephen Hawking

Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become - for a while, at least - any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. — Arthur C. Clarke

I'm not entirely sure there is a formula for this,' I say. But I wish there were. I would have followed it, plugging in all my data for x and all of Ethan's for y. And I would have worked out the results before involving my emotions, and I wouldn't feel as I feel now
like I've been dumped for real by an imaginary guy. — Erin McCahan

She preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable. — Louisa May Alcott

Imaginary (thinking) leads to bliss of the mind and the true (real thinking) leads to bliss of the Self (Soul). — Dada Bhagwan

The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finally maintained...all existing things are, in an intelligible sense, imaginary. — John Stuart Mackenzie

It's like I'm dreaming of the imaginary friend Katie and I had when we were little. She'd been so real to us as kids. We each remembered Anna, that's what we'd called her, just like we remembered bits of our parents. But now, in this dreamscape of Paradise Lost, our imaginary third twin has all grown up. — Beatrice Rose Roberts

They are made to believe they cannot behave without their imaginary friend watching over them. Some of them set out to demonstrate this too. They feel they have no purpose without this magic father in the sky, and their leaders make it so they are too weak willed to have any purpose other than being steered like a herd of tranquilized cattle. Looking to an imaginary paradise, which will never come, they pledge their real lives to slavery, keeping themselves captive. — Damien Ba'al

Art is real and imaginary, two worlds rolled into one - the fulfillment of the artist's insatiable soul. — Edward J. Fraughton

They offer, if we are wise enough or simple enough to take it, a model for what it means to give your heart with little thought of return. Both powerfully imaginary and comfortingly real, dogs act as mirrors for our own beliefs about what would constitute a truly humane society. Perhaps it is not too late for them to teach us some new tricks. — Marjorie Garber

Avarice, the spur of industry, is so obstinate a passion, and works its way through so many real dangers and difficulties, that it is not likely to be scared by an imaginary danger, which is so small, that it scarcely admits of calculation. Commerce, therefore, in my opinion, is apt to decay in absolute governments, not because it is there less secure, but because it is less honourable. — David Hume

You hate America, don't you?'
That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will. — Kurt Vonnegut

It was all beginning to run together in the back of Eleanor's mind, and the things that had probably really happened were confused with the things that probably hadn't. And every day everything in her whole past life - the real things and the imaginary things - was being pushed farther and farther back, because going to high school was so enormous, so vast! so different from all of Eleanor's life before. The milling crowds in the hall between classes, all those jostling elbows and swollen shoulders and bosoms, all those enormous hands and feet, they pushed and thumped and shoved at Eleanor's childhood, until there was no room anymore for anything but now, right now, a hurrying rushing now that was just incredibly thrilling, or absolutely rotten and just disgusting, this heaving present moment, right now. — Jane Langton

Don't wallow in brainstorming. Time spent fiddling with a business plan or filling up whiteboards with ideas is time that you could spend actually launching your business and seeing if the idea floats. Launching gives you real, solid feedback, instead of the imaginary 'what if' scenarios dreamed up in a conference room. — Naveen Jain

I had a good time that night, too," Michael said, "but I kept thinking, This is forever. This is forever. You will have this good time again and again, a million times over, until it will be like a play in which you and Laura and a few fugitive lives sit around an imaginary fire and talk and sing songs and love each other and sometimes throw imaginary brands at the eyes blinking beyond the circle of imaginary firelight. And then I thought - and this is where I sounded just like a real philosopher - And even when you admit that you know every line in the play and every song that will be sung, even when you know that this evening spent with friends is pleasant and joyful because you remember it as pleasant and joyful and wouldn't change it for the world, even when you know that anything you feel for these good friends has no more reality than a dream faithfully remembered every night for a thousand years - even then it goes on. Even then it has just begun. — Peter S. Beagle

It can be demonstrated that the child's contact with the real world is strengthened by his periodic excursions into fantasy. It becomes easier to tolerate the frustrations of the real world and to accede to the demands of reality if one can restore himself at intervals in a world where the deepest wishes can achieve imaginary gratification. — Selma Fraiberg

I still say Kellyanne could do with some real-live mates," went on my dad, as if he was talking to someone inside his beer.
Mum had stomped off into the kitchen. "Maybe they are real!" she shouted back at him after rattling a few plates together. "Ever thought about that, ye of little bloody imagination? — Ben Rice

The little girl's sense of secrecy that developed at prepuberty only grows in importance. She closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character: she plays at being a dancer like Tolstoy's Natasha, or a saint like Marie Leneru, or simply the singular wonder that is herself. There is still an enormous difference between this heroine and the objective face that her parents and friends recognise in her. She is also convinced that she is misunderstood: her relationship with herself becomes even more passionate: she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional: she promises that the future will take revenge on the mediocrity of her present life. From this narrow and petty existence she escapes by dreams. — Simone De Beauvoir

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. — Mary McCarthy

An interlude of false innocence has passed. Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream. We have indeed learnt to fix the shadows, but not to secure their meanings or to stabilize their truth values; they still flicker on the walls of Plato's cave. — William J. Mitchell

Some subjects are timeless, and I would say that food is one of them. Yet only by comparing notes this way can We of the World Who Have Known Real Hunger actually get together and form our own sort of imaginary club. Our members today would be from everywhere, from Africa, from Europe, from Asia, everywhere. But regardless of our assorted languages, regardless of our assorted politics, the members would have something far more in common than the members of most clubs do. Would would at least know that the universal implement we all have, the stomach, usually behaves the same way under duress and causes us all to have much the same kinds of dreams. — Gregory Boyington

Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory. — Andre Breton

More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays
from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman)
with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary. — Mel Gussow

Instead of attention being directed to people and what war would do to their lives, it was turned to the abstraction of the nation. The survival of the nation in the evolutionary struggle, the refusal to accept an insult to the nation, the avoidance of the nation being humiliated or dishonoured, seemed of supreme importance. Nations as imaginary people were put before the real people who made them up. — Jonathan Glover

I chuckle under my breath. I should've known. What woman can look in a mirror and not immediately spot every flaw, real or imaginary? — Nikki Sex

And at other times when Kellyanne held out Pobby and Dingan were real I would just sit there saying, "Are not. Are not. Are not," until she got bored of saying, "Are. Are. Are," and went running out screaming with her hands over her ears.
And many times I've wanted to kill Pobby and Dingan, I don't mind saying it. — Ben Rice

The Story Girl was written in 1910 and published in 1911. It was the last book I wrote in my old home by the gable window where I had spent so many happy hours of creation. It is my own favourite among my books, the one that gave me the greatest pleasure to write, the one whose characters and landscape seem to me most real. All the children in the book are purely imaginary. The old "King Orchard" was a compound of our old orchard in Cavendish and the orchard at Park Corner. "Peg Bowen" was suggested by a half-witted, gypsy-like personage who roamed at large for many years over the Island and was the terror of my childhood. — L.M. Montgomery

Right and wrong are superstitions; your desires, however, are real. Those who cannot achieve their desires, or who despair of doing so, often compensate by constructing imaginary frameworks. For example, if you wish to live in a world in which no one exploits animals, it is moralism to judge those who eat meat immoral instead of setting about disabling the animal exploitation industry. People retreat into moralism as a sort of consolation prize, for it is easier to rule in the realm of good and evil, fictitious as it may be, than to come to terms with our limited leverage upon this world and yet persist in endeavoring to change it. — CrimethInc.

Gratitude: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, altruism. Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion. — Robert A. Heinlein

For a lot of geeks, gaming is all about stripping who you are completely and entering this imaginary space, this world that's made for you, where winning and losing have nothing to do with real life. — Arthur Chu

Oh, and 13.1 million American people had their homes foreclosed. Because their debt, it turns out, was real; it was only the debt within the financial sector that was imaginary. It was only the people who generated the crisis who got three magical wishes from an economic genie. There was no abracadabra for ordinary people; they just got abraca-fucked. — Russell Brand

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the "real" everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human. — Susan Sontag

In this stillness that is at the same time movement, in this darkness that is at the same time light, change is found not in the realm of ideas but in the energizing desire that is realized through precipitation. Desire tends towards its own realization and change takes place when the desire for it shatters the bounds of the possible, breaking the dialectical equilibrium holding together the framework of what is existent. It is at such moments that the imaginary flows into the real and overwhelms it, inundating it until it has been absorbed. — Michael Richardson

I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing. — Neil Gaiman

There is no real evil in life, except great pain; all the rest is imaginary, and depends on the light in which we view things — Marie De Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise De Sevigne

By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or another, real or imaginary. — Jane Austen

How few our real wants, and how vast our imaginary ones! — Johann Kaspar Lavater

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. — C.S. Lewis

Imaginary happiness has an "end" and real happiness is "permanent". — Dada Bhagwan

If biologists so often forget the most universal of all biologic principles [variation], it is not surprising that men and women in general expect their fellows to think and behave according to the pattern that may fit the law-maker, or the imaginary ideals for which the legislation was fashioned, but which are ill-shaped for all real individuals who try to live under them. — Alfred Kinsey

Narrative, however, has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative's imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches over light-years. — Thomas Mann

Until we walk with despair, and still have hope, we will not know that our hope was not just hope in ourselves, in our own successes, in our power to make a difference, in our image of what perfection should be. We need hope from a much deeper Source. We need a hope larger than ourselves.
Until we walk with personal issues of despair, we will never uncover the Real Hope on the other side of that despair. Until we allow the crash and crush of our images, we will never discover the Real Life beyond what only seems like death. Remember, death is an imaginary loss of an imaginary self, that is going to pass anyway.
This very journey is probably the heart of what Jesus came to reveal. — Richard Rohr

Edgar, do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? There's no rule book that says how to do this." She laughed, bitterly. "Wouldn't that be great? No decisions to make. Everything laid right out for us. But there's no such thing. You want facts, don't you? Rules. Proof. You're like your father that way. Just because a thing can't be logged, charted, and summarized doesn't mean it isn't real. Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it. But sometimes things don't turn out that way. You have to pay attentin to what's real, what's in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it's a choice we could make. — David Wroblewski

But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf, not merely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes
a gulf, subject to tempest, and fear, and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious. — Washington Irving