Imagination is Eternity. [ Wm. Blake ]
The imagination never dies. [ Stedman ]
Imagination rules the world. [ Napoleon ]
Imagination is the air of mind. [ Bailey ]
When I could not sleep for cold,
I had fire enough in my brain,
And builded with roofs of gold,
My beautiful castles in Spain! [ Lowell ]
Imagination is the eye of the soul. [ Joubert ]
Imagination is the mightiest despot. [ Auerbach ]
He waxes desperate with imagination. [ William Shakespeare ]
Wit is the flower of the imagination. [ Livy ]
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact. [ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ]
Death is the tyrant of the imagination. [ Barry Cornwall ]
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear. [ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ]
The incurable ills are the imaginary ills. [ Marie Ebner-Eschenbach ]
Imagination is central; fancy, superficial. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Good and evil are chiefly in the imagination. [ Proverb ]
The human race is governed by its imagination. [ Napoleon ]
Science does not know its debt to imagination. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Faith is nothing but spiritualized imagination. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Men speak from knowledge, women from imagination. [ Rousseau ]
The imagination gallops, the judgment merely walks. [ French ]
Women have more heart and more imagination than men. [ Lamartine ]
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. [ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ]
Few men have imagination enough for the truth of reality. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible. [ Alan Turing ]
The enthusiast suffers his imagination to follow his heart. [ G. Crabb ]
There is nothing more fearful than imagination without taste. [ Goethe ]
Riches are as a stronghold in the imagination of the rich man. [ Solomon ]
An uncommon degree of imagination constitutes poetical genius. [ Dugald Stewart ]
He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet. [ Joseph Joubert ]
Imagination is a libertine that disrobes everything it covets. [ A. Ricard ]
Love is a canvas furnished by Nature, and embroidered by imagination. [ Voltaire ]
The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it. [ Hazlitt ]
Imagination is too often accompanied with a somewhat irregular logic. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
Wine makes a poor man rich in imagination, a rich man poor in reality. [ Edward Parsons Day ]
A prison is never narrow when the imagination can range in it at will.
Words are rather the drowsy part of poetry; imagination the life of it. [ Owen Feltham ]
This is the very coinage of your brain; This bodiless creation ecstasy. [ William Shakespeare ]
Imagination is the madcap of the brain (the merryandrew of the dwelling). [ Malebranche ]
Where bright imagination reigns, the fine-wrought spirit feels acuter pains. [ Hannah More ]
Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius. [ Isaac Disraeli ]
Imagination is but a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding. [ Carlyle ]
The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope. [ Beecher ]
The beauty of a young girl should speak to the imagination, and not to the senses. [ A. Karr ]
Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren. [ Burke ]
Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. [ Wm. Blake ]
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character. [ Lowell ]
A panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. [ Bovee ]
The imagination is the secret and harrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other; for images are the brood of desire. [ George Eliot ]
Keep the imagination sane; that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven. [ Hawthorne ]
People of a lively imagination are generally curious, and always so when a little in love. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination. [ Balzac ]
His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar. [ Macaulay ]
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason. [ Johnson ]
Women have much more heart and much more imagination than men; hence, fancy often allures them. [ Lamartine ]
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. [ Alan Turing ]
A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries. [ Bishop Berkeley ]
Romances, in general, are calculated rather to fire the imagination than to inform the judgment. [ Richardson ]
Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment. [ Warburton ]
Imagination has more charm in writing than in speaking: great wings must fold before entering a salon. [ Prince de Ligne ]
The imagination exercises a powerful influence over every act of sense, thought, reason, - over every idea. [ Latin Proverb ]
It is commonly the imagination which is wounded first, rather than the heart; it is so much more sensitive. [ Thoreau ]
The source of all passions is sensitiveness: it is the errors of imagination that transform them into vices. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
But what is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy: only the precursor of the reason. [ Emerson ]
Fancy is imagination in her youth and adolescence. Fancy is always excursive; imagination, not seldom, is sedate. [ Landor ]
Study detains the mind by the perpetual occurrence of something new, which may gratefully strike the imagination. [ Dr. I. Watts ]
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in this world. [ Pascal ]
Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
There comes a period of the imagination to each - a later youth - the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry. [ Emerson ]
Criticism must never be sharpened into anatomy. The life of the imagination, as of the body, disappears when we pursue it. [ Willmott ]
To think and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination. [ Isaac Disraeli ]
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never. [ Coleridge ]
Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and the council-chamber of thought. [ Basile ]
Irresolution and mutability are often the faults of men whose views are wide, and whose imagination is vigorous and excursive. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. [ Emerson ]
Imagination is not thought, neither is fancy reflection; thought paceth like a hoary sage, but imagination hath wings as an eagle. [ Tupper ]
Social life is filled with doubts and vain aspirings; solitude, when the imagination is dethroned, is turned to weariness and ennui. [ Miss L. E. Landon ]
Such is the power of imagination, that even a chimerical pleasure in expectation affects us more than a solid pleasure in possession. [ Henry Home ]
We are poor, indeed, when we have no half-wishes left us. The heart and the imagination close the shutters the instant they are gone. [ Landor ]
Misfortune, when we look upon it with our eyes, is smaller than when our imagination sinks the evil down into the recesses of the soul. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
It is a certain rule that wit and passion are entirely incompatible. When the affections are moved, there is no place for the imagination. [ Hume ]
Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest. [ Ouida ]
Power of imagination is regulated only by art, especially by poetry. There is nothing more frightful than imaginative faculty without taste. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
What the heart or the imagination dictates always flows readily; but where there is no subject to warm or interest these, constraint appears. [ Blair ]
Imagination is a mettled horse that will break the rider's neck when a donkey would have carried him to the end of his journey, slow but sure. [ Southey ]
They who, without any previous knowledge of us, think amiss of us, do us no harm: they attack not us, but the phantom of their own imagination. [ La Bruyere ]
We know the effects of many things, but the cause of few; experience, therefore, is a surer guide than imagination, and inquiry than conjecture. [ Colton ]
It is to teach us early in life how to think, and to excite our infantile imagination, that prudent Nature has given to women so much chit-chat. [ La Bruyere ]
Imagination is always the ruling and divine power, and the rest of the man is only the instrument which it sounds, or the tablet on which it writes. [ John Ruskin ]
In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals. [ Macaulay ]
The term intellect
includes all those powers by which we acquire, retain, and extend our knowledge; as perception, memory, imagination, judgment, and the like. [ William Fleming ]
Enthusiasm is that effervescence of the heart or the imagination, which is the most potent stimulus of our nature, where it stops short of mental intoxication. [ Chatfield ]
What chiefly distinguishes great artists from feeble artists is first their sensibility and tenderness; secondly, their imagination; and thirdly, their industry. [ John Ruskin ]
Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power which, if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or a Shakespeare. [ F. H. Hedge ]
The mathematics are friends to religion, inasmuch as they charm the passions, restrain the impetuosity or imagination, and purge the mind from error and prejudice. [ Arbuthnot ]
Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination. [ Swift ]
Reality surpasses imagination; and we see, breathing, brightening, and moving before our eyes sights dearer to our hearts than any we ever beheld in the land of sleep. [ Goethe ]
Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable. [ Dr. Johnson ]
A beautiful face fires our imagination, and we see higher virtue and intelligence in it than we can detect in its owner's head or heart when we descend to calm inspection. [ Charles Reade ]
That youthful fervor, which is sometimes called enthusiasm, but which is a heat of imagination subsequently discovered to be inconsistent with the experience of actual life. [ Beaconsfield ]
Flattery is an ensnaring quality, and leaves a very dangerous impression. It swells a man's imagination, entertains his vanity, and drives him to a doting upon his own person. [ Jeremy Collier ]
Love is not an intellectual admiration, a gratified imagination. It is too intangible for definement; but the soul knoweth its presence, by its fullness of content in the beloved. [ Mrs. Oakes Smith ]
Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity. [ Dr. Johnson ]
An everlasting tranquility is, in my imagination, the highest possible felicity, because I know of no felicity on earth higher than that which a peaceful mind and contented heart afford. [ Zimmermann ]
The joys of heaven are without example, above experience, and beyond imagination - for which the whole creation wants a comparison; we, an apprehension; and even the Word of God, a revelation. [ Bishop Norris ]
It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract; and therefore this must be as far above the other as judgment is a greater and nobler faculty than fancy or imagination. [ South ]
Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints. [ Dryden ]
The advice of a scholar, whose piles of learning were set on fire by imagination, is never to be forgotten. Proportion an hour's reflection to an hour's reading, and so dispirit the book into the student.' [ Willmott ]
Delusive ideas are the motives of the greatest part of mankind, and a heated imagination the power by which their actions are incited. The world in the eye of a philosopher may be said to be a large madhouse. [ Mackenzie ]
Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, etc., have the same use with burning glasses - to collect the diffused rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader's imagination. [ Swift ]
Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds, - epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it. [ Emerson ]
Gloom and sadness are poison to us, and the origin of hysterics. You are right in thinking that this disease is in the imagination; you have defined it perfectly; it is vexation which causes it to spring up, and fear that supports it. [ Madame de Sevigne ]
To make much of little, to find reasons of interest in common things, to develop a sensibility to mild enjoyments, to inspire the imagination, to throw a charm upon homely and familiar things, will constitute a man master of his own happiness. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Death is the tyrant of the imagination. His reign is in solitude and darkness, in tombs and prisons, over weak hearts and seething brains. He lives, without shape or sound, a phantasm, inaccessible to sight or touch - a ghastly and terrible apprehension. [ Barry Cornwall ]
Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment: it imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all. [ Whipple ]
The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to see: and sight must be reinforced by insight before souls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as well as objects, realities and relations as well as appearances and accidental connections. [ Whipple ]
People who love once in their lives are really shallow people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity is either the lethargy of custom or lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what constancy is to the intellectual life, simply a confession of failure. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
I am of opinion that there is nothing so beautiful but that there is something still more beautiful, of which this is the mere image and expression, - a something which can neither be perceived by the eyes, the ears, nor any of the senses; we comprehend it merely in the imagination. [ Cicero ]
Emulation is grief arising from seeing one's self exceeded or excelled by his concurrent, together with hope to equal or exceed him in time to come, by his own ability. But envy is the same grief joined with pleasure conceived in the imagination of some ill-fortune that may befall him. [ Thomas Hobbes ]
Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one. [ Lowell ]
A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of aesthetic beauty concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination - sculpture, painting, written fiction - is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay. [ Barry Cornwall ]
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. [ Lowell ]
Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height. [ Bruyere ]
Who can fathom the depth of a mother's love! No friendship so pure, so devoted; the wild storm of adversity and the bright sunshine of prosperity are all alike to her; however unworthy we may be of that affection, a mother never ceases to love her erring child. Often, when alone, as we gaze up to the starry heaven, can we in imagination catch a glimpse of the angels around the great white throne,
and among the brightest and fairest of them all is our sweet mother, ever beckoning us onward and upward to her celestial home. [ R. Smith ]
I have very often lamented and hinted my sorrow, in several speculations, that the art of painting is made so little use of to the improvement of manners. When we consider that it places the action of the person represented in the most agreeable aspect imaginable, - that it does not only express the passion or concern as it sits upon him who is drawn, but has under those features the height of the painter's imagination, - what strong images of virtue and humanity might we not expect would be instilled into the mind from the labors of the pencil! [ Steele ]
The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]