World Of Imagination Quotes & Sayings

Despite all the challenges facing higher education in America, from mounting student debt to grade inflation and erratic standards, our system is rightly the world's envy, and not just because our most revered universities remain on the cutting edge of research and attract talent from around the globe. We also have a plenitude and variety of settings for learning that are unrivaled. In light of that, the process of applying to college should and could be about ecstatically rummaging through those possibilities and feeling energized, even elated, by them. But for too many students, it's not, and financial constraints aren't the only reason. Failures of boldness and imagination by both students and parents bear some blame. The information is all out there. You just have to look. — Frank Bruni

He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy. — Irene Nemirovsky

At home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of toast. 'Yum!' he'd say, and 'Charcoal! Good for you!' and 'Burnt toast! My favorite!' and he'd eat it all up. When I was much older he confessed to me that he had not ever liked burnt toast, had only eaten it to prevent it from going to waste, and, for a fraction of a moment, my entire childhood felt like a lie, it was as if one of the pillars of belief that my world had been built upon had crumbled into dry sand. — Neil Gaiman

It is a machine which I invented, designed and built. It is a way of gaining access to a variety of realities. As I say, at the moment it leads to a world created from Henry's imagination.' 'Does he know?' 'No, and I'd prefer it if you didn't tell him. He might be offended.' 'What do you mean by variety of realities?' 'It means that for any given state of the universe, there are an infinite number of other possibilities. For example, we came to this restaurant and you ordered chicken. You could have ordered fish. A universe where you did order fish is a viable alternative to this one. One where you ordered roast Brontosaurus is more distant and more difficult to access.' Rosie's — Iain Pears

Stop being so fruitlessly busy and dream. Use your imagination. Reach out into the unknown and dream of how you can enlarge your experience and improve your mind and your soul and your world. — Mary Balogh

It doesn't matter where you are in the world because it's about where you are up here,' she touched the side of her head lightly. 'It's about the other world I inhabit. The world of dreams, hope, imagination and memories. I'm happy up here,' she tapped her temple again and smiled, 'and because of that I'm happy up here too.' She held out her arms and displayed the countryside around her ... — Cecelia Ahern

Imagination doesn't always mean looking outside of the box, but taking a closed box and seeing a different world from within it. — Lionel Suggs

The perceived failings of leaders of other neutral or occupied European countries, including France, Spain, Sweden or Norway, or of the countries that fought alongside the Nazis, have not caught the public imagination in the English-speaking world in anything like the same way. — Clare O'Dea

All the manifested world of things and beings are projected by imagination upon the substratum which is the Eternal All pervading Vishnu , whose nature is Existence- Intelligence ; just as the different ornaments are all made out of the same gold. — Adi Shankara

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world. — Blaise Pascal

I am an actor and I live in the world of pretend in my working capacity. I live in the world of my imagination. — Derek Jacobi

I think that the obscurity of the theory is not the fault of quantum mechanics but is rather due to the limited capacity of our imagination. When we try to "see" the quantum world, we are rather like moles used to living underground, to whom someone is trying to describe the Himalayas. Or like the men imprisoned at the back of Plato's cave. — Carlo Rovelli

I Am Primate

I was once taught, that I am a soul in a body.
I once believed I was separate from the earth.
A stranger in a strange land,
a sinner in need of a Savior.
But, isn't this my home? This beautiful world?
Isn't this my form?
These hands, these eyes, this touch?
Am I to believe I have violated a rule,
just by being born?
Who claims this right to judge,
and on what authority do you stand?
The truth screams out from my cells.
I am not the imagination of a God,
I am a voice in the earth,
I am that which you deny!
The earth is my home and the stars my destiny.
I will touch the planets through
the hands of my children
. . . not the will of your ghost!
I am a voice in the evolutionary continuum
and I claim the right to be alive,
without your story.
For I Am Human, I Am Proud,
and I AM . . . PRIMATE! — Christopher Zzenn Loren

The arts can open the door to the imagination, pushing the envelope of how peace can be created. It takes courage to take this kind of risk, and courage is what we all need to create a better world. — Wayne Shorter

The limits of your imagination create the boundaries of your world. — Debasish Mridha

What you accomplish in life is limited only by your imagination and the fear of reprisal. Life is too fleeting and unrewarding to have to live with the added anus of indignity. The denial of one's inevitable demise is what causes most of the astringent blandness in the world. When your existence ends most certainly in death, there is no such thing as 'going too far'. There are no 'lines' you should fear to cross except the finish line. Playing it safe is the most dangerous thing you could do. — Jim Goad

Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us. — James Russell Lowell

It is wrong to draw a sharp line in one's imagination between the "nature" present on the Rocky Mountain front and that available in the suburbanite's own front yard. The natural world found on even the most perfect and stylized of lawns is no less real than that at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Different, yes, but to draw too sharp a distinction between the sparsely settled world of Alaska and the dense suburbs of Levittown is a prescription for the plundering of natural resources. It is easy to see how the yard, conceived as less natural and thus less important than the spotted owl, is easily ignored. The point is underscored by research showing that, surprisingly, people who evince concern for the environment are more likely to use chemicals on their yards than those who are less ecologically aware. — Ted Steinberg

There is something, like a feeling, that reminds me of happy days filled with exploration and imagination. Days where the rest of the world fell behind me and only left a friend. — Angeles Kossio

Prophetic preaching is dangerous work, not only because it has a subversive edge but because it requires an epistemological break with the assumed world of dominant imagination. This epistemological break makes us aware of our assumptions we have not recognized or reflected upon. — Walter Brueggemann

We travel to see beauty of souls in new landscapes. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs. — Rose Macaulay

We sabotage our creative possibilities because the world revealed by our imagination may not fit well with the life we have taken so much trouble to construct over the years. Faced with the pain of that distance, the distance between desire and reality, we turn just for a moment and quickly busy ourselves. — David Whyte

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

An enchanted world is one that speaks to the soul, to the mysterious depths of the heart and imagination where we find value, love, and union with the world around us. As mystics of many religions have taught, that sense of rapturous union can give a sensation of fulfillment that makes life purposeful and vibrant ... — Thomas Moore

Children know that if they have a question about the world, the library is the place to find the answer. And someone will always be there to help them find the answer-our librarians. (A librarian's) job is an important one. Our nation runs on the fuel of information and imagination that libraries provide. And they are in charge of collecting and sharing this information in a helpful way. Librarians inform the public, and by doing so, they strengthen our great democracy. — Laura Bush

Blessed with the Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him ... — Christopher Moore

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. — Terence McKenna

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

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. — J.G. Ballard

This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease. — Robert F. Kennedy

Along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world. — David Abram

Novel writing is World Building & Word Weaving (Neil Postman's terms). — J.M. Varner

The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination- an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? — Arundhati Roy

I think it is every woman's duty to make herself as attractive as her time and means permit. After all, there you are, in your person- a living symbol of the progress of art, science and imagination. To be as attractive as we can be is almost a civic duty; there are so many sad and ugly things in the world that I think women should say to themselves humbly, not with vanity, 'I will try to be as pretty as I can, so that when people look at me, they will feel refreshed. I will make an effort to be easy on the eye.' — Ilka Chase

I loved the world of Oz. I guess as a young man, I was just drawn to fantasy worlds. I liked being transported to alternative realms where a lot of my early imagination was sparked. — James Franco

Why of course it's unlikely!' I said. 'Oh, by far!
The awesome-est things in the world often are! — Al Yankovic

Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books. — Joseph Joubert

The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. But if you have more projects than you have time for, you are not going to be an unhappy person. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Spirits were seen to be very much part of the everyday world, and you were accosted by spirits all the time. It's only really quite recently that we've relegated the fantastic as being just imagination and not real and having no purpose. — Brian Froud

Righteousness and love, law and grace, life and death, as well as time and eternity all intersect at the cross; displaying a divine wisdom that staggers the imagination and leads the humble heart to bow in thankful adoration. To understand the cross of Christ is to understand the heart of God toward a fallen world He wants to save. — Steven Cook

Your body talks to you in sensations; feelings of tension, fear, hunger, pleasure, aliveness, and pain are just some of the ways it attempts to communicate with you. This is why staying connected to your physical self - with as little conflict as possible - is fundamental to health and wellbeing. If you spend copious amounts of energy attempting to diminish your body, or if your imagination is limited such that you cannot see beauty in yourself, then you become disconnected from the world around you. You lose perspective and purpose. — Connie Sobczak

Everything in the world of soul has a deep desire and longing for visible form; this is exactly where the power of the imagination lives. — John O'Donohue

When it comes to the way you present yourself online, the acid test is: Can you imagine Grace Kelly doing it? If you can picture her saying "Dem hos betta watch out imma beat some ass tonite", then congratulations, you have a much better imagination than mine. Likewise, if you can't quite see her posting a snapshot of herself drunkenly pole-dancing, think twice about broadcasting those pictures to the world. — Rosie Blythe

I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep — Gloria E. Anzaldua

If you meditate or exercise, with the inward attention, the subtle world of thoughts, imagination, breathe, sensation and spiritual energy will get clear to you. — Roshan Sharma

For weeks I read round the clock. I entered the warp of the world of the imagination. Chapter numbers became the enumerations by which I measured hours. — Sam Wazan

Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference? — Denis Johnson

There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish. — Ted Hughes

Beware of turning into the enemy you most fear. All it takes is to lash out violently at someone who has done you some grievous harm, proclaiming that only your pain matters in this world. More than against that person's body, you will then, at that moment, be committing a crime against your own imagination. — Ariel Dorfman

She flapped her hands, anxious energy coursing through her. "How can you be so calm?"
He got to his feet, unfolding with an easy grace. He held out a hand, his dark eyes focused solemnly on hers. "Come with me."
"For what?"
"That's part of the lesson." Was it her imagination, or did a twinkle of humor stir in those eyes? "Center yourself, and grab onto the here and now."
That made no sense - what was he now, Sir Medieval Zen Master? But she slipped her hand into his strong, calloused one. He hauled her up until she bumped into his chest. With a finger under her chin, he tilted her face until she looked in his eyes.
"Listen to the world around you. Hear the birds? Hear the small animals scurrying? You are in this moment, this moment only, and sometimes that's all you can do, all you can be." His finger pulled away, brushing against her skin, and he tapped her nose, stepping away. — Angela Quarles

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with. — Thomas Sowell

To paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow ... we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains, it turns out, are not prisoners of the world we live in; we can fly free! We can, any time we like, create the impossible. — Robert Krulwich

I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science ... This loosening of thinking seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world. — Max Born

Nothing and no one in the world could kill the love I have for you. I have surrendered my whole individuality, the very essence of my being to you. I have given you my body time after time to treat as you pleased. All the hoardings of my imagination I have laid bare to you. There isn't a recess in my brain into which you haven't penetrated. I have clung to you and caressed you and slept with you and I would like to tell the whole world that I clamour for you. You are my lover and I am your mistress, and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination
the most powerful in the world. — Violet Trefusis

I'm up to my neck in the real world, every day. Just you try doing your VAT return with a head full of goblins. — Terry Pratchett

You are pure-hearted, Branza, and lovely, and you have never done a moment's wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart. However sweet that other place was, it was not real. It was an artifact of your mam's imagination; it was a dream of hers and a desire; you could not have stayed there forever and called yourself alive. Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to. (357) — Margo Lanagan

One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. — William F. Buckley Jr.

We have to devise means of making known the facts in such a way as to touch the imagination of the world — Eglantyne Jebb

Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America's literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world. — Lorin Stein

Because the world of this film begins and ends in the imagination of Tim Burton, you're not seeing a movie that's been shot on locations that you've seen a million times. Because this world has no rules, you're seeing so many different and separate brushstrokes and colors and characterizations somehow getting combined through Tim. — Anne Hathaway

The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way. — Katherine Paterson

I get irritated with the world. I get irritated with politicians. I get very irritated with governments and with corporations, but in terms of imagination - my imagination is always fertile. I'm either thinking of my own things or constantly engaged by the things that other people do. — Patti Smith

The true function of logic ... as applied to matters of experience ... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is — Bertrand Russell

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination. — W. Somerset Maugham

We base our ideas about the world on our personal experience, and that experience has ingrained the rate of growth of the recent past in our heads as "the way things happen." We're also limited by our imagination, which takes our experience and uses it to conjure future predictions - but often, what we know simply doesn't give us the tools to think accurately about the future. When we hear a prediction about the future that contradicts our experience-based notion of how things work, our instinct is that the prediction must be naive. If I tell you [...] that you may live to be 150, or 250, or not die at all, your instinct will be, "That's stupid - if there's one thing I know from history, it's that everybody dies." And yes, no one in the past has not died. But no one flew airplanes before airplanes were invented either. — Tim Urban

Your daughter's coming of age, you ought to let her see the world a little. — Susumu Katsumata

the pity which the spectators then exhibit is in so far a consolation for the weak and suffering in that the latter recognize therein that they possess still one power , in spite of their weakness, the power of giving pain. The unfortunate derives a sort of pleasure from this feeling of superiority, of which the exhibition of pity makes him conscious; his imagination is exalted, he is still powerful enough to give the world pain. Thus the thirst for pity is the thirst for self-gratification, and that, moreover, at the expense of his fellow-men; it shows man in the whole inconsiderateness of his own dear self, but — Friedrich Nietzsche

No beast of reality, or creature of imagination, is as terrible as mankind. Or as loving. It's a contradiction. I've always liked contradictions. Today I see both sides of the coin unveiled in gruesome and beautiful imagery, captured by my eyes and filed away in my mind, like still shots taken by a world-renowned photographer. — David Estes

It would be very interesting to speculate on what the human imagination is going to do with a frontierless world where it must seek its inspiration in uniformity rather than variety, in sameness rather than contrast, in safety rather than peril, in probing the harmless nuances of the known rather than the thundering uncertainties of unknown seas or continents. The dreamers, the poets, and the philosophers are after all but instruments which make vocal and articulate the hopes and aspirations and the fears of a people.

The people are going to miss the frontier more than words can express. For four centuries they heard its call, listened to its promises, and bet their lives and fortunes on its outcome.

It calls no more... — Walter Prescott Webb

It art can only succeed through the cooperating imagination and intelligence of its consumers, who fill out, for themselves, the artist's world and make it round, and whose own special genius partly determine the ultimate glory of it. — William H Gass

President Reagan was a leader at a time when the American people most needed leadership. He outlined a vision that captured the imagination of the free world, a vision that toppled the Communist empire and freed countless millions. — Dennis Hastert

Poems for children help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world. Humorous poems tickle the funny bone of their imaginations. — Charles Ghigna

To eat one's fill, eat until the exhaustion of the appetite, was the principal pleasure that the peasants dangled before their imagination, and one that they rarely realized in their lives.
They [the peasants] also imagined other dreams coming true, including the standard run of castles and princesses. But their wishes usually remained fixed on common objects in the everyday world. One hero gets "a cow and some chickens"; another, an armoire full of linens. A third settles for light work, regular meals, and a pipe full of tobacco. And when gold rains into the fireplace of a fourth, he uses it to buy "food, clothes, a horse, land." In most of the tales, wish fulfillment turns into a program for survival, not a fantasy of escape. — Robert Darnton

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. — Guy Davenport

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world. — Alain De Botton

Yet, even allowing for these failings, was not St John Clarke still a person more like myself than anyone else sitting round the table? That was a sobering thought. He, too, for longer years, had existed in the imagination, even though this imagination led him (in my eyes) to a world ludicrously contrived, socially misleading, professionally nauseous. On top of that, had he not on this earlier occasion gone out of his way to speak a word of carefully hedged praise for my own work? Was that, therefore, an aspect of his critical faculty for which he should be given credit, or was it an even stronger reason for guarding against the possibility of corruption at the hands of one whose own writings could not be approved? — Anthony Powell

Imagination is the light by which we can penetrate
new worlds of thought and experience. — Charles F. Haanel

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world. — Helen Vendler

Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics — Daniel Kahneman

Even those novelists most commonly deemed "philosophical" have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an "austere, unselfish, candid" prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something "mysterious, ambiguous, particular" about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. "If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships," she said. "And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. — Iris Murdoch

When you read a book [The Hunger Games], you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination. In the book, it's great when she can push a button and food comes up, as per your order. — Nina Jacobson

Many will tell you with mockery and ridicule that the abolition of war can only be a dream ... But we must go on or we will all go under. And the great criticism that can be made is that the world lacks a plan that will enable us to go on ... We must have sufficient imagination and courage to translate the universal wish for peace - which is rapidly becoming a universal necessity - into actuality. — Douglas MacArthur

There was part of me that wanted to see the world and travel to distant places, but I could only do it in my imagination, so I read ferociously and imagined things. — George R R Martin

When you open a book,
You step into a world full of
Imagination — Me

Fantasy writing must be grounded in both truth and life experience if it is to work. It can be as inventive and creative as the writer can make it, a whirlwind of images and plot twists, but it cannot be built on a foundation of air. The world must be identifiable with our own, must offer us a frame of reference we can recognize."
"Fantasy stories work because the writer has interwoven bits and pieces of reality with imagination to form a personal vision. — Terry Brooks

All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison. — Arthur Schopenhauer

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life. — Bertrand Russell

What if stars were the glimmering tears of a giant, welling in his cheeks, waiting to fall at the first tender stroke of emotion? What if the moon were a wide-open eye gazing down on our tiny, little world and its tiny, little inhabitants as they rush to and fro in pursuit of tiny, little dreams? What if the sun were the glowing heart of a great beast, pumping hot blood to keep him alive while providing warmth for our pitiful world? Ahhh, imagination; it is a wondrous thing! — Richelle E. Goodrich

I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination. — Julian Assange

It is not so much as to say that something has occured; but to describe the very essence of the occurance. One must take hold of his readers and pull them into his world ... the world that he has penned, with the utmost care and attentiveness.
And then, when the readers are fully submerged in this magnificently crafted place of wonder; they will see, and touch, and smell, and feel all the elements of the author's imagination. — Jason W. Blair

Intelligence isn't just about how many levels of math courses you've taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over 6 characters. It's about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it - then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It's about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging. — Andrea Kuszewsk

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken to calling "the Republic of Imagination." I think of it as Nabokov's "somehow, somewhere" or Alice's backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or documentation. The only requirements for entry are an open mind, a restless desire to know and an indefinable urge to escape the mundane. — Azar Nafisi

Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future ... Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands. — Susan Griffin

When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind. — Catherine Fisher

Growing up I often wondered how the world would be today if, since the beginning of human life, every person acted as I did. — Criss Jami

Another Weeping Woman
Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.
Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world
Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves,
And you are pierced by a death. — Wallace Stevens

They spell-caught the sounds of cat paws, the breath of fish, the spittle of birds, the hairs of a woman's beard, and the roots of a mountain, and spun them around the sinews of a bear. That made a bond that looked as fine as a ribbon of silk, but, since it was made of things not in this world, it was so strong nothing in the world could break it. — Ingri D'Aulaire

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat
was, literally, talked into life. — Michael Chabon

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