Quotes about Imagination

I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good looking, and that I could paint.

The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

the poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at the harvest-time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield.

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

We artists are indestructible, even in a prison cell or a concentration camp I would be all right in my own world of art. Even if I had to paint my pictures with my tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.

I do not search; I find.

Religion as actually lived, not as some figment of the academic imagination, always claims to involve knowledge of how things are.

You need to imagine what your day would look like with Jesus at your side—as he will be.