Famous Quotes & Sayings

Saul Bellow

All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

Rod Serling

Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.

Saint Francis de Sales

Is it not a great temptation to be so valiant in imagination and so cowardly in execution?

William Warburton

Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment.

William Tyndale

To have a faith, therefore, or a trust in anything, where God hath not promised, is plain idolatry, and a worshipping of thine own imagination instead of God.

Will Self

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

Yvonne Craig

Everybody in their own imagination decides what scary is.

Tycho Brahe

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.

William Irwin Thompson

Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.

William Butler Yeats

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.

William Butler Yeats

The living can assist the imagination of the dead...

William Butler Yeats

By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.

William Butler Yeats

Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

Walter Savage Landor

Fancy is imagination in her youth and adolescence. Fancy is always excursive; imagination, not seldom, is sedate.

Winston Churchill

There is required for the composition of a great commander not only massive common sense and reasoning power, not only imagination, but also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten.

Rhonda Byrne

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.

Vikram Seth

I just love music - by no stretch of the imagination am I professionally competent.

Rose Tremain

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

Samuel Johnson

They whose activity of imagination is often shifting the scenes of expectation, are frequently subject to such sallies of caprice as make all their actions fortuitous, destroy the value of their friendship, obstruct the efficacy of their virtues, and set them below the meanest of those who persist in their resolutions, execute what they design, and perform what they have promised.

Samuel Johnson

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.

Samuel Johnson

No cause more frequently produces bashfulness than too high an opinion of our own importance. He that imagines an assembly filled with his merit, panting with expectation, and hushed with attention, easily terrifies himself with the dread of disappointing them, and strains his imagination in pursuit of something that may vindicate the veracity of fame, and show that his reputation was not gained by chance.

Rufus Sewell

I do as much comedy as I possibly can but I’m basically limited by the imagination of the secretaries who make the decisions,

William Hazlitt

Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.

William Hazlitt

The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.

William Hazlitt

The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.

Wendell Berry

Action can only be understood in relation to place; only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.

Wendell Berry

If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?

Wadah Khanfar

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.

Yann Martel

India is a place where all stories are possible. You forget that the imagination can take hold of anything and contemplate it and love it and describe it.

Wynton Marsalis

What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I do not hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them gleich alles zusammen - at the same time all together.

Zygmunt Bauman

I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.

Zelda Fitzgerald

I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.