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:

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded.

Cynthia Ozick Interview with The Paris Review (1987)

Activism and feminism both draw on the imagination, requiring taking risks and thinking outside the box. This is the very definition of poetry.

Margaret Randall Interview (2022)

The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life...is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.

Northrop Frye The Educated Imagination (1963)

imagination and inventiveness are common human potentialities. All people invent.

Ella Cara Deloria Speaking of Indians (1944)

It was not so much shame that I experienced as the feeling that the actual world was an unfamiliar organism utterly unlike the world of my imagination.

Osamu Dazai