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Imagination Quotes

Wallace Stevens has the most entries, then Shakespeare, Skye Jethani, the Filipino poet Gémino Abad and Joseph Joubert. The line everyone wants is Einstein’s “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” which comes from a 1929 interview with George Sylvester Viereck, where he says he is enough of an artist to draw freely upon it. Emerson, in Letters and Social Aims (1876), says science does not know its debt to imagination, and Thoreau, in 1849, calls the world canvas to our imaginations.

Three entries are flagged. The line about computers being fast, accurate and stupid, humans slow, inaccurate and brilliant, is credited to Einstein and marked misattributed. Bacon is credited with a line on imagination and a sense of humor, and Poe with a remark about religion, both disputed; the notes put the Poe remark in a 1901 biography that has been much criticized.

Random quote on Imagination

Most quoted on imagination:

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

Richard Rorty

But thou that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation.

William Wordsworth Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

May I free myself from the ever-pressing chest
and enter the garden of imagination
by leisurely hiding brain on hill summits.

Suman Pokhrel

The power of imagination, of image, which is the fundamental power of literature, is the power to determine a people’s fate.

Paula Gunn Allen The Sacred Hoop (1986)

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

George Santayana

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

A little knowledge is said to be a dangerous thing, but it is not dangerous to the imagination. Knowledge is to the imagination what fuel is to flame. A little feeds it; a great deal extinguishes it.

Alfred Austin The Poet's Diary (1904)

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Wallace Stevens Opus Posthumous (1957)

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

This is the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation ecstasy.

William Shakespeare

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.

William Shakespeare

My God, how can you stand such things, children? They say, "Mom, don't you know it is only television, it is not real."

Lauretta Bender

All human accomplishment has the 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!

Saul Bellow Henderson the Rain King (1959)

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

Ambrose Bierce The Cynic's Dictionary (1906)

This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

Rod Serling

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

George Bernard Shaw

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

Edgar Degas

Imagination was the key (as John Lennon was to claim, in a song too often misjudged as simpleminded).

Ellen Willis Coming Down Again (1989)

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