What would the practice of medicine, science, religion, psychotherapy, or life itself be like if we understood even a glimmer of the power of imagination? Carroll J. Wright, Ph.D.
The man who has no imagination has no wings.
Ali, Muhammad
When you stop having dreams and ideals -- well, you might as well stop altogether.
Anderson, Marian
Act as if you have already achieved your goal and it is yours.
Anthony, Robert
Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.
Bacall, Lauren
The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
Bacon, Frances
To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is. He said, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.
Bach, Richard
Man is an imagining being.
Bachelard, Gaston
The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.
Beecher, Henry Ward
Sentiment is the ripened fruit of fantasy.
Belazy, Madame
Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.
Bell, E. T.
The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
Berger, John
The way we imagine ourselves to appear to another person is an essential element in our conception of ourselves. In other words, I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.
Bierstedt, Robert
To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book?
Blake, William
Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?
Blake, William
What is now proved was only once imagined.
Blake, William
The human race is governed by its imagination.
Bonaparte, Napoleon
Imagination rules the world.
Bonaparte, Napoleon
By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.
Brande, Dorothea
To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery --even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness --is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.
Breton, Andre
The bridges that you cross before you come to them are over rivers that aren't there.
Brown, Gene
Live out of your imagination instead of out of your memory.
Brown, Les
Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.
Bunuel, Luis
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
Carlyle, Thomas
Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.
Carlyle, Thomas
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.
Carson, Rachel
People can die of mere imagination.
Chaucer, Geoffrey
The great successful men of the world have used their imaginations... they think ahead and create their mental picture, and then go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building -- steadily building.
Collier, Robert
Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and begin to build.
Collier, Robert
See the things you want as already yours. Think of them as yours, as belonging to you, as already in your possession.
Collier, Robert
Pictures help you to form the mental mold...
Collier, Robert
Make every thought, every fact, that comes into your mind pay you a profit. Make it work and produce for you. Think of things not as they are but as they might be. Don't merely dream -- but create!
Collier, Robert
I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.
Connelly, Billy
Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
Conrad, Joseph
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
Cooley, Charles Horton
Death is the tyrant of the imagination.
Cornwall, Barry
When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.
Coue, Emile
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
Covey, Stephen R.
There will come a time when images have all gone by and you will see you know not what they are. Images are symbolic and they stand for something else.
Course in Miracles, A
We are what and where we are because we have first imagined it.
Curtis, Donald
I noticed an almost universal trait among Super Achievers, and it was what I call Sensory Goal Vision. These people knew what they wanted out of life, and they could sense it multidimensionally before they ever had it. They could not only see it, but also taste it, smell it, and imagine the sounds and emotions associated with it. They pre-lived it before they had it. And the sharp, sensory vision became a powerful driving force in their lives.
Devore, Stephen
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
Democritus
Faith is a fine invention
When gentlemen can see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.
Dickinson, Emily
The formula "two and two make five" is not without its attractions.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
The mind must see visual achievement of the purpose before action is initiated.
Douglas, Mack R.
How reluctantly the mind consents to reality!
Douglas, Norman
Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.
Einstein, Albert
To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
Einstein, Albert quotations
The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.
Einstein, Albert
Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions.
Einstein, Albert
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
Einstein, Albert
In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary instincts.
Einstein, Albert
What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Eliot. T.S.
The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
We live by our imagination, our admiration s, and our sentiments.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.
Escher, M.C.
Hold a picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind's eye and you will be drawn toward it. Picture yourself vividly as winning and that alone will contribute immeasurably to success. Great living starts with a picture, held in your imagination, of what you would like to do or be.
Fosdick, Harry Emerson
Image creates desire. You will what you imagine.
Gallimore, J. G.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
Gaiman, Neil
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Gandhi, Mahatma
Peak performers develop powerful mental images of the behavior that will lead to the desired results. They see in their mind's eye the result they want, and the actions leading to it.
Garfield, Charles A.
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
Gaultier, Jules de
Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.
Gerard, Ralph
There is nothing more frightful than imagination without taste.
Through controlled inner talking from premises of fulfilled desire, seeming miracles are performed.
Goddard, Neville
All happiness depends on the active voluntary use of imagination to construct and inwardly affirm that we are what we want to be. We match ourselves to our ideals by constantly remembering our aim and identifying ourselves with it. We fuse with our aims by frequently occupying the feeling of our wish fulfilled. It is the frequency, the habitual occupancy, that is the secret of success. The oftener we do it, the more natural it is. Fancy assembles. Continuous imagination fuses.
Goddard, Neville
Any time we feel misunderstood, misused, neglected, suspicious, afraid, we are spending our thoughts and wasting out time. Whenever we assume the feeling of being what we want to be, we are investing.
Goddard, Neville
Imagination travels according to habit. Imagination has choice, but it chooses according to habit. Awake or asleep, man's imagination is constrained to follow certain definite patterns.
Goddard, Neville
But after the choice is made and accepted so that it forms the individual's habitual consciousness, then imagination manifests its infinite power and wisdom by moulding the outer sensuous world of becoming in the image of the habitual inner speech and actions of the individual.
Goddard, Neville
A change of circumstance happens as a result of a change in your state of consciousness."
Goddard, Neville
All transformation begins with an intense, burning desire to be transformed. The first step in the "renewing of the mind" is desire. You must want to be different [and intend to be] before you can begin to change yourself. Then you must make your future dream a present fact. You do this by assuming the feeling of your wish fulfilled. By desiring to be other than what you are, you can create an ideal of the person you want to be and assume that you are already that person. If this assumption is persisted in until it becomes your dominant feeling, the attainment of your ideal is inevitable.
Goddard, Neville
In giving birth to your ideal you must bear in mind that the methods of mental and spiritual knowledge are entirely different. This is a point that is truly understood by probably not more than one person in a million. You know a thing mentally by looking at it from the outside, by comparing it with other things, by analyzing it and defining it; [by thinking of it:] whereas you can know a thing spiritually only by becoming it, [only by thinking from it]. You must be the thing itself and not merely talk about it or look at it.
Goddard, Neville
You must be conscious of being healthy if you are to know what health is. You must be conscious of being secure if you are to know what security is.
Goddard, Neville
Prune your imagination by withdrawing your attention from all unlovely and destructive ideas and concentrating on the ideal you wish to attain.
Goddard, Neville
You do this by imagining that you already are what you want to be – and already have what you want to have.
Goddard, Neville
Whatever you may think of the question of free will, the truth is your experiences throughout your life are determined by your assumptions(imaginations) – whether conscious or unconscious. An assumption builds a bridge of incidents that lead inevitably to the fulfillment of itself.
Goddard, Neville
What should be done between the assumption (imagination) of the wish fulfilled and its realization? Nothing. It is a delusion that, other than assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled, you can do anything to aid the realization of your desire.
Goddard, Neville
By assuming (imagining) the idea already to be a fact, it is converted into reality.
Goddard, Neville
"I will be" is a confession that "I am not. " The Father's will is always "I AM." Until you realize that YOU are the Father (there is only one I AM, and your infinite self is that I AM), your will is always "I will be. " In the law of assumption your consciousness of being is the Father's will. The mere wish without this consciousness is the "my will."
Goddard, Neville
If you change your concept of yourself, the events ahead of you in time are altered, but, thus altered, they form again a deterministic sequence starting from the moment of this changed concept.
Goddard, Neville
Inasmuch as your assumption is creative and forms an atmosphere, your assumption, if it be a noble one, increases your assurance and helps you to reach a higher level of being.
Goddard, Neville
It is impossible to do anything. You must be in order to do.
Goddard, Neville
Few people have the imagination for reality
Goethe. Johann Wolfgang von
Any change in the behavior of the inner self will result in corresponding outer changes.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von
My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.
Guin, Ursula K.
The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.
Hill, Napoleon
Our minds become magnetized with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds and these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.
Hill, Napoleon
First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.
Hill, Napoleon
Capability means imagination...
Hill, Napoleon
All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination, Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.
Hill, Napoleon
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the “as if” technique.
James, William
Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
Johnson, Samuel
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
Joubert, Joseph
One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.
Joubert, Joseph
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Jung, Carl
Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.
Jung, Carl
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
Keats, John
The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
Kettering, Charles F.
Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.
Kettering, Charles F.
Soft focus is an important skill that can effect us metaphorically. In other words, the way we see the future has everything to do with how well we can look up and see the expanded horizon before us.
Kline, Peter
We are told never to cross a bridge till we come to it, but this world is owned by men who have crossed bridges in their imagination far ahead of the crowd.
Library, Speakers
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
Lennon, John
Some people have just enough imagination to spoil their judgment.
Mallory, Paul
Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.
Maltz, Maxwell
Study the situation thoroughly, go over in your imagination the various courses of action possible to you and the consequences which can and may follow from each course. Pick out the course which gives the most promise and go ahead.
Maltz, Maxwell
When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative success mechanism within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or willpower.
Maltz, Maxwell
For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.
Maltz, Maxwell
Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.
Maltz, Maxwell
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
Mccartney, Paul
We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of our environment.
McDonald, John
It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.
Mencken, H. L.
If you close your eyes, you could just as well imagine me to be vintage
Ali MacGraw
The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.
Meredith, George
Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
Miller, Henry
You must first clearly see a thing in your mind before you can do it.
Morrison, Alex
The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none more important thanor works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilizer. It is important to recognize that in our time man has not written one word, thought one thought, put two notes or two bricks together, splashed color on to canvas or concrete into space, in a manner which will be of any conceivable imaginative interest to posterity.
Muggeridge, Malcolm
What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.
Mumford, Lewis
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
Nabokov, Vladimir
A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.
Newton, Sir Isaac
What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable.
Nevelson, Louise
There are no facts, only interpretations.
Nietzsche, Friedrich
I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. First I see the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes, and I see the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on landing. Then there is a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality.
Nicklaus, Jack
It takes as much imagination to create debt as to create income.
Orr, Leonard
Imagination decides everything.
Pascal, Blaise
Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in this world.
Pascal, Blaise
It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
Pavese, Cesare
Celebrate what you want to see more of.
Peters, Thomas J.
Everything you can imagine is real.
Picasso, Pablo
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
Poe, Edgar Allan
It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.
Pound, Ezra
Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.
Proust, Marcel
All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.
Proust, Marcel
There is a fine line between dreams and reality, it's up to you to draw it.
Quilliam, B
The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized.
Richards, Mary Caroline
Imagination is eminently a wearable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest.
Ruskin, John
The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power,
Ruskin, John
Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them.
Ruskin, John
An unimaginative person can neither be reverent or kind.
Ruskin, John
The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
Sade, Marquis De
How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means that every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.
Sade, Marquis De
Imagination gallops; judgment merely walks.
Unknown
Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.
Schuller, Robert H.
The entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and an actualizer. He can visualize something, and when visualizes it he sees exactly how to make it happen.
Schwartz, Robert L
Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.
Sterling, Rod
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
Shaw, George Bernard
People often get their imaginations mixed up with their memories.
Shaw, P.K.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
When you think something, you think in picture. You don't think a thought in words. You think a picture that expresses your thought. Working with this picture will produce it into your experience.
Speare, Grace
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Stevens, Wallace
The imagination is man's power over nature.
Stevens, Wallace
By visualizing your goals, you can get your subconscious to work toward making these mental pictures come true.
Success Magazine
Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the vacuum wireless light, my turbine engine and many other devices have all been developed in exactly this way.
Tesla, Nikola
I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
Thoreau, Henry David
It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
Thoreau, Henry David
We can gradually grow into any condition we desire, provided we first make ourselves in habitual mental attitude the person who corresponds to those conditions.
Troward, Thomas
You cannot depend on your judgments when your imagination is out of focus.
Twain, Mark
If you clearly and vividly IMAGINE yourself in the first person doing, being, having the things and qualities you truly want... then you will be using positive imagination to begin a change to fulfilling that image.
Unknown
Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides.
Tyger, Frank
You must pre-live the future... not re-live the past... and savor the moment.
Unknown
Living starts with a picture held in the imagination, of what you would like to do or be.
Unknown
How do we know that the sky is not green and we are all color-blind?
Unknown
Okay, who put a "stop payment" on my reality check?
Unknown
Imagination is the pontoon bridge making way for the timid feet of reason.
Unknown
Reality bites... and doesn't let go.
Unknown
One bright day in the middle of night two dead boys rose to fight. Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot one another. A deaf policeman heard the noise, and saved the lives of the two dead boys. If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.
Unknown
It is important to rely on your imagination for your sense of humor and your memory for your truths. Not the other way around.
Unknown
Anyone who thinks the sky is the limit, has limited imagination.
Unknown
Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.
Verne, Jules
Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination.
Vizinczey, Stephen
I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.
Voltaire
We are what we imagine ourselves to be.
Vonnegut Jr., Kurt
What is reality anyway! It's nothing but a collective hunch.
Wagner, Jane
Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.
Wagner, Jane
Understand that you, yourself, are no more than the composite picture of all your thoughts and actions. In your relationships with others, remember the basic and critically important rule: If you want to be loved, be lovable. If you want respect, set a respectable example!
Waitley, Denis
You have all the reason in the world to achieve your grandest dreams. Imagination plus innovation equals realization.
Waitley, Denis
If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.
Ward, William A.
Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
Weil, Simone
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our life.
Weil, Simone
Imagination is a quality given a man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.
Wilde, Oscar
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
West, Jessamyn
What you see is what you get.
Wilson, Flip
Mis-imagination is your only fault, sin, crime or mistake. Your anxiety contains a life-saving message you must examine in order to discover the true meaning and power of the god-power within, your imagination.
Wright, Carroll J
In the Bible, the word imagination is used 21 times, and always preceded by the word “evil” but nowhere in the Bible does it say that imagination is evil. The only thing evil about imagination is its mis-use. The whole world comes into being by imagination, how can it be anything less than the source of the Infinite Good?
Wright, Carroll J
An idea is salvation by imagination.
Wright, Frank Lloyd
First have being in your mind. Make real in your mind then bring that being into reality. The genius is he who sees what is not yet and causes it to come to be.
Zarlenga, Peter Nivio
Every time I close the door on reality it comes in through the windows.
Yane, Jennifer
The Chinese pianist Liu Chi Kung was imprisoned for seven years during the Cultural Revolution, during which time he had no access to a piano. When he returned to giving concerts again after he was released, his playing was better than ever. Asked how this was possible since he had not practice for seven years, he replied: I did practice, every day. I rehearsed every piece I had ever played, note by note, in my mind.
Zilbergeld, Bernie
Some of these quotes are muddy and some are clear. You have to sort them out, your life depends on it.
