Quotes about Imagination

There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit, when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never been.

It is when our budding hopes are nipped beyond recovery by some rough wind, that we are the most disposed to picture ourselves what flowers they might have borne, if they had flourished.

Yet it did seem (though not to him, for he saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could take as strong a hold as Fact. p.

It is remarkable that what we call the world, which is so very credulous in what professes to be true, is most incredulous in what professes to be imaginary; and that, while, every day in real life, it will allow in one man no blemishes, and in another no virtues, it will seldom admit a very strongly-marked character, either good or bad, in a fictitious narrative, to be within the limits of probability.

BRAIN: A commodity as scarce as radium and more precious, used to fertilize ideas.

But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.

In childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years?

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything.

True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets-that is, creators of all sorts-seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.