William Shakespeare on Imagination
1564–1616 England
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7 quotes
The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.
This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation ecstasy.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
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.
How abhorred in my imagination it is!
Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it
To lie that way thou go'st, not whence thou com'st:
Suppose the singing birds musicians;
The grass whereon thou tread'st the presence strew'd;
The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more
Than a delightful measure or a dance.
Richard II (1595)
This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions; these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.