Quotes & Sayings About Using Your Imagination

If you're using your imagination, you tend to look into the past for ideas. — Paul McCartney

is often considered to be something children use in play and then discard when they become adults and put away childish things. We are therefore not surprised to learn that children use their imagination to enter stories, to experience them, and even to meet God there, but few adults think of using their imagination to meet God. However, following the lead of children could enrich the spiritual walk for adults. — Catherine Stonehouse

Small children like to mimic their parents. Give them something good to mimic read a book.

Children learn what they live.


Morals are taught by parents from a young age. They are not learned from text books.

Buying a book for a child is a small price. A smile on a child's face is priceless.


Communication with children give better odds in knowing what they want.

Using imagination can inspire us all. Why not allow children to explore their imagination?

A happy child is a child reading a good book. — Cindy Roman

And I think for a moment, because people don't actually ask that very often. They tell me what they think I feel because they've read it in books, or they say incredible things like "autistic people have no sense of humour or imagination or empathy" when I'm standing right there beside them (and one day I'm going to point out that that is more than a little bit rude, not to mention Not Even True) or they -- even worse -- talk to me like I'm about five, and can't understand.
"It's like living with all your senses turned up to full volume all the time," I say. "And it's like living life in a different language, so you can't ever quite relax because even when you think you're fluent it's still using a different part of your brain so by the end of the day you're exhausted. — Rachael Lucas

Storytelling is all about using the imagination, for me at least it is. That's why I'm bored sometimes to see movies. I'm bored to see TV. I never see TV. I see news sometimes. I'm sorry to say, I work in this business and I love working in it, but I haven't seen a movie in so many years. — Peter Stormare

Exploit a subject or a theme to its greatest potential by bringing all possible reference to bear - then put aside the reference and create again using the potential of your unfettered imagination. — Robert Genn

They say using your imagination makes you live longer. — John Corey Whaley

I chose Bagdasarian Productions when I heard from some colleagues at work who were buying story boards at the time back in the early '90. I met the man once when I came in with the first half of the story board and the only thing he said when looking at the first half of the board was, "It's so nice to see someone using their imagination." — Mike Royer

Intelligence guided by the will using memory and imagination assisted by intuition. — Romana Kryzanowska

The best way to ensure that your writing is as good as you can make it is simply to consult your imagination and judgment as you write and take note of whether you are using an expression that has found its way into the stream simply because it's always there, swirling lifelessly in an eddy, where it was recently deposited by some other writer you have read. — Joseph Epstein

You're already using your imagination because you're watching fiction and then you're trying to believe that this girl who weighs 100 lbs, soaking wet, could actually beat up a guy. Which works in a lot of situations but in a lot of situations you look at it and you're like, "Come on. Could you please get someone in there who actually has biceps and not just because they don't eat?" — Katee Sackhoff

Oy, Jake," he said, shaking his head, like a benevolent rabbi I'd disappointed with my weak will. "Impatience. Seriously. I know this is hard for you ... " He glazed over. Drifted a moment. Went through something in his impenetrable interior ... "Actually I do know this is hard for you. I'm sorry. I'm not using my imagination. That was my New Year's resolution, you know. Work on standing in the other fellow's shoes. That and to read one poem every day. — Glen Duncan

So all is not lost I tell myself; therefore nothing being totally lost, nothing is lost. Something like the courage to be happy welled up in me and, though alive, the feeling of being brought back to life. Since leaves may be granted. All that is required is a revolution in our habits, the mind working on itself unceasingly so as to cast itself beyond itself, using its imagination to drag itself towards something it doesn't know how to get to, but this isn't so much to ask. I took the measure of the breadth and solidity of the anguish that had become my inner space of late by comparing it with the sudden feeling of emerging from a pulmonary cave-in and recovering the pleasure of breathing deeply which I didn't know I'd lost, sipping the air. All of a sudden I became again. One discovers by breathing that one had stopped breathing. One only discovers one's stopped breathing when one takes the next breath. — Helene Cixous

I love roles that don't really have a template or a paradigm and force me to create using my own imagination ... that really, really turns me on. — J. August Richards

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all. — Edward Rutherfurd

Using my concentration wisely and connecting widely"
dwelling on the reality I n I creating.
developing the root thinking, room clean inside" balancing naturally and spiritually,
ambition is the mission"
I n I only limitation is my imagination"
I am free from vexation, full filled with Jah love.
Good is always victorious over evil"
Destiny guided by the most high.
- Amadou Jarou Bah — Amadou Jarou Bah

Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don't want. — Esther Hicks

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

Using one's imagination to the fullest is necessary for a happy life. — Claire Trevor

When you spend time worrying, you're simply using your imagination to create things you don't want. — Shannon L. Alder

Learning is to discover that something is possible. We are using most of our energies for self-destructiv e games, self-preventing games. We prevent ourselves from growing the very moment something unpleasant, something painful comes up. At that moment we become phobic, we run away, we desensitize ourselves. Neurotic suffering is suffering in imagination, suffering in fantasy. — Frederick Salomon Perls

You can keep your mind open and use your imagination and be creative even when you're older. For kids, I definitely think keeping your mind open and using your imagination and being able to play pretend and that it's okay. — AnnaSophia Robb

Using your imagination to create mental images stimulates your mind, helps organize your life and keeps your focus in a particular direction. It allows your unconscious mind to work toward the image you have created, the goal. It's about understand the life you want to live, and seeing it unfold before you. — Georges St-Pierre

Like Phoenix, you work all your life to find your way, through all the obstructions and the false appearances and the upsets you may have brought on yourself, to reach a meaning - using inventions of your imagination, perhaps helped out by your dreams and bits of good luck. And finally too, like Phoenix, you have to assume that what you are working in aid of is life, not death. But you would make the trip anyway - wouldn't you? - just on hope. 1974 — Eudora Welty

The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. The supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist, Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart. — James Joyce

Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, and Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper to save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher. — Lawrence Wright

Father, Please forgive me for anything that my eyes have seen that defiled me or offended you. Please forgive me for using my imagination for wrong purposes and make it clean now by the blood of Jesus. Cleanse me and heal me now and I thank you for it in Jesus' name. Amen. — Michael Van Vlymen

The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. — Terence McKenna

If words had cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only the conventional phrases. — Willa Cather

Doing voice work is more like recording music that people are going to listen to. You're creating an oral experience using whatever bells and whistles you have in your voice, and you can shut your eyes and use your imagination and nobody's going to see if the faces you make don't match the voices you make. That's a lot of fun. — Nick Offerman

You get your heart stomped by the opposite sex, and you're hurting so badly that you write 'Sometimes When We Touch.' But then what happens when you've been married for 25 years? You can't rely on those emotional male-female roller coasters. You have to start using your imagination and the powers of empathy more. — Dan Hill

Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed. — Paul Karl Feyerabend

Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. — Neil Gaiman

These [Arab] youth who have been inspired by universal values are idealistic enough to imagine a magnificent future and, at the same time, realistic enough to balance this kind of imagination and the process leading to it - not using violence, not trying to create chaos. — Wadah Khanfar

When you worry about something, you are using your immense power of imagination negatively. You are imagining the worst, and as you imagine the worst, you are bringing it to you.
When you are excited about something, you are using your power of imagination positively. You are imagining the best, and as you imagine the best, you are bringing it to you. — Rhonda Byrne

I've always been interested in technology, but specifically how we can use machines to engage the imagination. I started using computers when I was young and was fascinated by creating rules and instructions that allow a computer to engage in a dialogue with humans. The stories found in the data all around us can do just that. — Aaron Koblin

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized. — Isabel Allende

A great artist paints a picture on the canvas of his mind using the colors of his love and imagination before transferring the image onto a real canvas. — Debasish Mridha

By using repetition, images, and other strategies - all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional - marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or to buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. It is important to appreciate that these disciplinary mechanisms transmit values and truth claims, but not via propositions or cognitive means; rather, the values are transmitted more covertly ... This covertness of the operation is also what makes it so powerful: the truths are inscribed in us through the powerful instruments of imagination and ritual. — James K.A. Smith

I believe that it's an author's job to cast his imagination into the far spaces. Your life should - and I think it's inescapable that it will - inform your work. I'm all for using anything that can make your art better, but your intuition should be an equal partner. — Brent Weeks

Physics, my friend, is a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp. It is a set of answers to certain questions that we put to the world, and the world supplies the answers on the condition that we will not then ask it other questions, questions shouted out by common sense. And common sense? It is that which is understood by an intelligence using senses no different from those of a baboon. Such an intelligence wishes to know the world in terms that apply to its terrestrial, biological niche. But the world - outside that niche, that incubator of sapient apes - has properties that one cannot take in hand, see, sniff, gnaw, listen to, and in this way appropriate. — Stanislaw Lem

If we want young people to develop the habits of thinking for themselves, using their imagination, being open to new ideas, saying when they don't understand, and exploring real challenges together, then they have to see their teachers doing the same thing. — Guy Claxton

Using your imagination is the one time in life you can really go anywhere. — Ann Patchett

The resulting action is based on informed intuition, or as he calls it, "superthought." In jazz, superthought goes beyond determining the "right" answer: It allows one to see new possibliities where others see only more of the same, and to construct the rate "useful combination." Perhaps we can superthink our way through choice by learning the fundamentals of its composition, and then using the knowledge to create more music where there might otherwise by only noise. Insisting on more when one already has a great deal is usually considered a sign of greed. In the case of choice, it is also a sign of the failure of the imagination, which we must avoid or overcome if we wish to solve our multiple choice problem. — Sheena Iyengar

Creativity is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential. Simply put, aside from using one's imagination - perhaps more importantly - creativity is the power to act. — Ai Weiwei

Using your imagination means that you are using your most powerful tool of creation, manifestation and modification — Dorothy Holder

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure. — Geraldine Brooks

I see all these people talking about acting as a great spiritual thing. It's not. There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do, but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination. — Eddie Marsan

The mere act of dreaming is a vitalizing, life-affirming endeavor. As it turns out, using your imagination is very, very good for your wellbeing. Einstein believed that imagination was even more important than knowledge itself. — Danielle LaPorte

People may think I'm trying something new by telling stories, but they're just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That's what I do. — Steven Wright

Charles Laughton, who's a great hero of mine, only ever made one film and it happens to be one of the great films ever, which is 'The Night of the Hunter.' It's full of his kind of imagination and creation and how you do things and just in the way he used the studio, I just thought it was a fantastical way of using the studio. — Brian Cox

It is a grave error for historians of literature to interpret the national spirit of the age in an oversimplified manner, ignoring the complexity of various cultural and life processes. Instead of using their imagination, they try to read the future by observing the hands of a clock which is still busy measuring the past. — Mieczyslaw Jastrun

I've studied a technique called the Sanford Miesner technique, that teaches you how to focus. It's mainly about daydreaming. And the technique's really about imaginary circumstances. Using your imagination to sort of daydream about stuff. It makes you emotional in a scene. — Sam Rockwell

Never stop your child from using their imagination and having fantasies, as they could become the next great author.
~ D.L. Bates — Dennis Lee Bates Jr.

In order to move our self image higher on the spectrum of performance, we must specifically attack our self-talking and our self-thinking? By using constructive imagination - the eye of faith - we can change our self image. — Hyrum W. Smith

Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he'd ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of. — James S.A. Corey

So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio
remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales
we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination. — Wallace Stevens

In my photographic work I'm generally attracted to places that contain memories, history, atmospheres and stories. I'm interested in the places where people have lived, worked and played. I look for traces of the past, visual fingerprints, evidence of activities - they fire my imagination and connect into my own personal experiences. Using the analogy of the theater, I would say that I like to photograph the empty stage, before or after the performance, even in between acts. I love the atmosphere of anticipation, the feeling in the air that events have happened, or will happen soon ... — Michael Kenna

I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination. — John Irving

The main purpose of my work is to provoke people into using their imagination and make their surroundings more exciting. — Verner Panton

Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest creative thinkers of all time, strongly recommended the habit of meditation in the dark. He wrote: "For I have found in my own experience that it is of no small benefit, when you lie in bed in the dark, to recall in imagination, one after another, the outlines of the form you have been studying." He often awoke to find his problems solved. Da Vinci would often stand silent and motionless before a painting for hours, without using his brush, as though waiting for spiritual guidance. — Wilferd Peterson

Reducing and reusing take nothing more than a rethink on the way we shop, and using our imagination with the things that we might once have considered junk. — Sheherazade Goldsmith

If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

We can attract almost anything by using our imagination. All we need to do is to hold the picture of desires/dreams in our mind and focus on it as it blends with emotions that are of higher vibrations. — Hina Hashmi

I like to see films that come out with lower budgets because you're forced into using your imagination. You don't have everything at your fingertips. You have to create it from scratch. — Heath Ledger

I want to be remembered as an imaginer, someone who used his imagination as a way to journey beyond the limits of self, beyond the limits of flesh and blood, beyond the limits of even perhaps life itself, in order to discover some sense of order in what appears to be a disordered universe. I'm using my imagination to find meaning, both for myself and, I hope, for my readers.-Clive Barker — Clive Barker

I love using my imagination. I love writing about animals. — Mary Pope Osborne

As a dreamer, you're inevitably called to dream yourself awake using the full resources of your imagination and heart. You may have buried or repressed your season of insight, but it happened, and now you are irrevocably changed. — Carolyn Elliott

Have you ever seen any member of radiohead aside from me in public? Do they interact or 'lift' objects? Holograms, all of them. I created them in 1991 using my massive brainpower. Even pitchforkmedia is a product of my brilliant imagination. — Thom Yorke

What is the use of having an imagination if you can't make it work for you? — Carolyn Wells

If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination. He is compelled to participate in the creative act, which I consider very important. — Antoni Tapies

The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I'm not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ's so I'm constantly aware of, and respect that. I have a tendency to give my readers vivid descriptions of panoramic viewpoints, soft breezes, and the late evening as it scrapes against the emerging night and present this step by suspenseful step. Once I get them to the threshold of that unseen cliff, I shove them off and say, take it from there. — Carl Henegan

Using my imagination and creativity is exciting to me. — Jan De Bont

It takes great skill to tell a compelling story in under 60 seconds. These five directors have mastered the format, using their talent, craft and imagination to provide us with some of the most innovative filmmaking out there today. — Michael Apted

Everyone has creative potential. Creativity involves using your imagination and inventiveness. Your unique expression of yourself is your creativity...Creativity can be magic when visiting people who are ill. — Patch Adams