c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Life is about choices and chances. You make a choice and take a chance.
— Truth Devour, Wantin
He had seen how the spirit, the reserves in [Bond], could pull him out of badly damaged conditions that would have broken the normal human being. He knew how a desperate situation would bring out those reserves again, how the will to live would spring up again in a real emergency. He remembered how countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting rooms when the last war had broken out. The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser. He made up his mind. He turned back to M. "Give him one more chance.
— Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice
The ending shouldn't determine the meaning of anything, a story or a life. Logically, I don't think it can--didn't Heidegger say something to that effect? That the meaning of all our moments cannot be contingent upon an end-point over which we have no control? That if we are happy right now, that means something, even if we die tomorrow? Narrative integrity is overrated. I don't need to know that the story of my life has a happy ending to enjoy it. A good thing, too, because I hear all the characters die in the end.
— Alexa Stevenson
Life is but a short and fevered rehearsal for a concert we cannot stay to give.
— stephen christian
Life is not about what happened yesterday nor what will happen tomorrow,it's about this particular moment!
— Runa Magnus
Perhaps I shouldn’t like it so much, but I’ve always been one for finding beauty in the ugliest stories.
— LeAnn Neal Reilly, The Last Stratiote
You control whether you are happy. It's all your narrative and you can change it if you choose to." - L. R. W. Lee Andy Smithson: Blast of the Dragon's Fury
— L.R.W. Lee
One's manner of living, is a matter of life
— Elio Melo, Soul Journey
Some memories seems to be so far away .. however it was just yesterday !! Others seem to be so clear ,, however it was years ago !! Actually it depends on how far we are from those who shared us those moments !!
— Gehad Badr
When admiring human accomplishments we should not confusethe achievements of the few for the capacity of the many.
— Geoffroy Birtz
One can overcome fear by acknowledging it and then choosing not to heed it." - L. R. W. Lee, Andy Smithson: Blast of the Dragon's Fury
— L.R.W. Lee
The luckiest people are the hardest working people." - L. R. W. Lee
— L.R.W. Lee
Life is
—  live it!
Most times problems are not solved with more money. It usually takes innovation." - L. R. W. Lee, Andy Smithson: Blast of the Dragon's Fury
— L.R.W. Lee
There are too many windbags in this world. Speak only when you are competent in a subject - It produces dignity." - L. R. W. Lee Andy Smithson: Blast of the Dragon's Fury
— L.R.W. Lee
Holding a grudge hurts the one holding it more than the one it's held against... All that wasted time and energy... Let it go." L. R. W. Lee Andy Smithson: Blast of the Dragon's Fury
— L.R.W. Lee
All POOR wish to become RICH,BUT all RICH wish the POOR remain POOR.
— shaikh mustafa
Life is filled with all goods and bads around each one of us,It's our rights to choose the path and we are responsible of all our deeds and consequences.
— OctavE Life
Success comes from a thousand little things done well, rarely from a silver bullet, even though we'd all like to believe that as our actions betray." - L. R. W. Lee, Andy Smithson: Blast of the Dragon's Fury
— L.R.W. Lee
Drink from the fountain of youth and cloak yourself in the garments of wisdom.
— Truth Devour, Wantin
To change someone's mind, requires only that you speak a more compelling narrative about their situation than their current one.
— L.R.W. Lee
Between the calendar and checkbook, ones priorities are laid bare.
— L.R.W. Lee
Water liked to be free. Given time, water could overcome any barrier, and it hated to be trapped, just like Percy.
— Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena
We are healed to help others. We are blessed to be a blessing. We are saved to serve, not to sit around and wait for heaven.
— Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
If you are on the right path, it will always be uphill.
— Henry B. Eyring
Never cry for the same reason twice.
— Stephen Richards
If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.
— Junot Díaz, Drown
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.André Chevalier
— Nikki Sex, Bound and Freed Boxed Set
Life's most obvious truths are the hardest to see but once you've burned everything to the ground they are the only things left standing.André Chevalier
— Nikki Sex, Elizabeth's Bondage Boxed Set
I was the Titanic and the iceberg all at once.
— Jeremy Glass
Don't allow money to become the yardstick by which you measure the worth of the world around you!
— Andrew James Pritchard, Circle In the Sand
But who is ever fair in an argument?
— A.B. Shepherd, Lifeboat
Once you understand life--you understand life's potential.
— Sean Baltz
Grass is always greener on your side, just switch places with your neighbor.
— Saru Singhal, Rousing Cadence
Keep your head high and your skirt down.
— Marie Rudisill
Live life with passion from our hearts and believe. Let love be the reason and purpose of life
— Jerrycel Verlinden
we are like puppets synchronized by god........
— mayank prasad
It is said that the depressive has a clearer view of reality than does the euphoric. Perhaps, but the euphoric has a clearer view of life.
— Anthony Marais, Delusionism
Sometimes careful just isn’t good enough.
— A.B. Shepherd, Lifeboat
The genesis of life, unfold before us, the mere essence of our being……tarnished.Mankind can no longer survive on its own.
— Robin Alleyna
...a small stream...sings a carefree song as it runs by your house. It is so nonthreatening that you can sit by it, look at your reflection in the water, and even wash your hands in it. It is yours, your personal stream. Yet you know that it has originated in the sea and is on its way back to where it has come from. When passing by your house, however, it is yours. You can say it is a personal moment you have torn out of eternity to keep in your pocket for yourself.
— Fatemeh Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran
Some people would rather be right that happy, I choose to be happy".
— Catie Hartsfield, The Year Of The Cicadas
Think like a maverick, Fight like a gladiator, Love with a humble heart and Die for a cause worth dying for... Be a "game changer"....The basic tenets of my life philosophy.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics
And then there is the most dangerous risk of all -- the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
— Randy Komisar, The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur
Life works on strange laws of nature (Karma).One never knows when a friend turns enemy & vice-versa.Rely on your Self
—  self-reliance
She's become a Russian again, he thought. When something works, she's grateful. When it doesn't work, it's life.
— John le Carré, The Russia House
It might be a little silly for someone getting to be my age to put this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down clearly : I'm the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two everyday running alone, not speaking to anyone as well as four of five hours at my desk, to be neither difficult or boring.
— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another...
— Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.
— Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.
— Peter Watts, Blindsight
Emotions are like a virus, a common cold, disrupting the flow of logic in people's minds.
— Clyde DeSouza, Memories With Maya
Most things happen for a reason and it may take years to discover why, but this is almost always for the better.
— Ursula A. Ciller
The idea is that if you practice the Naikan part of Constructive Living, life becomes a series of small miracles, and you may start to notice everything that goes right in a typical life and not the few things that go wrong.
— Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club
We must not be so ready to fancy ourselves intentionally injured... It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
You're never too old to be young.
— Paul Palnik, Eternaloons: The Palnik Anthology
Nature has endowed the human with A HEART to detect the sensibility offeelings and A WEIRD MIND to contemplate ....so be A REAL HUMAN BEING.
— Ghumakkad Agantuk Ram
I had to wonder what sadistic pleasure and entertainment human suffering must provide to the divine game players who decided the fate of their pawns in a board game they made of life.
— Clyde DeSouza, Memories With Maya
I would rather rudder
— Victor J. Garcia
Life will be better when we start to enjoy it
— Putu Satria Jaya Guna
I dont care if you have the smallest part to do with my life or the largest, I love everyone I've ever met, and if you don't like me i still respect you as a person rather than hate you for what you believe in.
— Shane Phillips
O man ! Do and Do something otherwise thou will have the only deposit of Zilch with thee.
— Ghumakkad Agantuk Ram
So live your life that those who speak ill of you will not be believed.
— one of the ancient Greeks I'm on a hunt to find which one.
What was it Danilov told me before I left? Something about how one day I would stand at a crossroads where I could choose the Light, which illuminated the sky with its warmth and golden glow - or the Darkness, which at first seemed soothing and inviting, but which would consume me in its flames. But do I have to wait for that crossroads? Isn't it present at every moment of my life?
— Peter H. Fogtdal, The Tsar's Dwarf
Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.
— Jojo Moyes, The Girl You Left Behind
I see humans but no humanity.
— Jason Donohue
The nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons.They arise from sense perception,and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.
— Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita
Haters are my favorite. I´ve built an empire with the bricks they´ve thrown at me. Keep on hating...
— CM Punk
Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that's who. (...)You saw how close men lived to the beast. You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast.
— Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
Fear of the unknown.They are afraid of new ideas.They are loaded with prejudices, not based upon anything in reality, but based on… if something is new, I reject it immediately because it’s frightening to me. What they do instead is just stay with the familiar.You know, to me, the most beautiful things in all the universe, are the most mysterious.
— Wayne W. Dyer
You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn't much time left.
— Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you - MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.
— Henry Miller, Black Spring
You can chase love. If you are lucky enough to catch it…is it really yours?
— Brian MacLearn
One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)
— Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern
And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer’s wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in ‘75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and plowing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment.
— Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod
Life teach you lessons and those lessons are very painful.
— Adnan Khan
A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible.
— Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
Life is a strong drink served up in an extremely short, and fragile shot glass. We shouldn't waste a single drop.
— Samantha Sotto
Pride & honor & truth & virtue & kindliness," he enumerated silkily. "You are right, Scarlett. They aren't important when a boat is sinking. But look around you at your friends. Either they are bringing their boats ashore safely with cargoes intact or they are content to go down with all flags flying.
— Margaret Mitchell
The greatest foe of human is his mighty wisdom.
— Chandrashekar, Paradise of Fantasies
‎Every opportunity missed is an opportunity for regret
— Karl Kloppenborg
Looking at the fire on the stone.
— Daae ALF
She had learned to live light because life itself could be heavy enough.
— Jackson Burnett, The Past Never Ends
I don't compare life to anything. Life can't be defined or compared, I just know that it dresses itself as a murderer in the end.
— Griselda Salazar
This is unbelievable,” James said. “I mean, you guys are out here planning to build an armored car out of my dad’s old, and I mean old, car. Mom is in the house making cookies like this is just an everyday occurrence. Once this starts, you guys probably won’t live through it, and nobody is acting like it’s a big deal. I don’t know that I’m comfortable with my parents preparing for their funeral.” “Everyone has to die of something, son,” Rick said. James looked stunned. “So you are thinking about that as a possibility? Then why go to all the trouble of putting armor on the car and putting in that big engine?” “Because I have to get back to the starting point, which in this case is the Deal’s Gap,” Rick answered. “And the car won’t make it if I don’t make modifications.” “Once they figure out what you’re doing and where you’re going, they’ll ambush you. You won’t be able to get out of it. They’ll gun you and Mom down in cold blood.” James was trying to hide the emotion from his face.
— Rich Hoffman
we are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.
— Alan Chadwick
Poetry is more than a form of art. It's a vibration and a pulsing heart. Whether it's sour or whether it's sweet. It can give you strength no one can defeat
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out...
— David Bowie
They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing his lines.""Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re living in a tragedy or a farce.""We need more special effects and dance numbers.
— Bill Watterson
Books are the reality you get to choose
—  life is the reality you hide from inside a book.
Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.
— Paul Russell, The Coming Storm
Learn how to think a few moves ahead at once. In life, if you can anticipate the human mind, you can anticipate all possible futures.
— Lionel Suggs
You can truly value life, when you have looked Death in the eyes and held its hand.
— Lionel Suggs
He was a glass half full kind of person and she was...what? The glass is going to break before you can even pour kind of person. Yikes.
— Erin McCarthy, Jacked Up
Whenever there is love beyond boundaries .... Whenever trust flows deeper than oceans .... Nevertheless, a Trial is born .... You pass that trial, sacred you shall be .... if you don't, your are immortal !!!!
— M.W.Latif
want to live like there's no tomorrow. Love like I'm on borrowed time. It's good to be alive." ~ Musician Jason Gray
— Jason  Gray
Logic will get you from A to Z
—  imagination will get you everywhere.
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
— Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.
— Patricia Highsmith
Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.
— Maria Montessori
Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed
—  it cannot be ignored.
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
— Jonathan Swift
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
— J.G. Ballard
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.
— Carl Sagan
My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Because when you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worth while.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive--it's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination then, would there?But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn't talk? If you say so I'll stop. I can STOP when I make up my mind to it, although it's difficult.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Hate is a lack of imagination.
— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
Imagination means nothing without doing.
— Charlie Chaplin
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
— G.K. Chesterton
Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.
— Bill Hicks
It's delightful when your imaginations come true, isn't it?
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
She always wanted to believe in things.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
You seemed so far away," Miss Honey whispered, awestruck."Oh, I was. I was flying past the stars on silver wings," Matilda said. "It was wonderful.
— Roald Dahl, Matilda
Love what you do and do what you love. Don't listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.
— Ray Bradbury
There was a single blue line of crayon drawn across every wall in the house. What does it mean? I asked. A pirate needs the sight of the sea, he said and then he pulled his eye patch down and turned and sailed away.
— Brian Andreas, Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
— J.K. Rowling
To know is nothing at all
—  to imagine is everything.
My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk
— John Keats
There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.
— Lynda Barry, What It Is
I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.
— Jeanette Winterson
Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.
— Paulo Coelho, Brida
The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.
— Terence McKenna
They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
— Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.
— Lauren Bacall, By Myself and Then Some
Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all
—  it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
The possible's slow fuse is lit by the Imagination.
— Emily Dickinson
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
All things are possible until they are proven impossible.
— Pearl S. Buck
So rapid is the flight of dreams upon the wings of imagination.
— Alexandre Dumas
Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes." "Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
She was always daydreaming. She never wanted to live in the real world; she always seemed to be separated from other children her age. They couldn’t understand her or her imagination. She was always thinking outside of the box, breaking rules, and only following what her heart told her was right.
— Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
...Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive--it's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There'd be no scope for imagination then, would there?
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.
— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
Do you know what I think Mayflowers are, Marilla? I think they must be the souls of the flowers that died last summer, and this is their heaven.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Indeed, the human mind appeared to suffer from a crippling need to fabricate in the absence of concrete proof.
— J.R. Ward, Lover Mine
Living too much in one's head can be dangerous.
— Anna Godbersen, Rumors
The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.
— Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
When you're feeling lonelyand no one is aroundRemember to look inside yourselfand a best friend will be found
— Stephen Cosgrove, Maynard's Mermaid
I believe in the goodness of imagination.
— Sue Monk Kidd
I was not so sure, but Jem told me I was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if I started behaving like one I could just go off and find some to play with.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
— Carson McCullers, Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers
We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
— J.K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
— Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending a Staircase
A loud boom exploded the air, making Thomas jump. It was followed by a horrible crunching, grinding sound. He stumbled backward, fell to the ground. He wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it for himself. The enormous stone wall to the right of them seemed to defy every known law of physics as it slid along the ground, throwing sparks and dust as it moved, rock against rock. The crunching sound rattled his bones. He looked around at the other openings. On all four sides of the Glade, the right walls were moving toward the left, closing the gap of the Doors.  Then one final boom rumbled across the Glade as all four Doors sealed shut for the night.
— James Dashner, The Maze Runner
Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.
— Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels
I was very much provoked. Of course, I knew there are no fairies; but that needn't prevent my thinking there is.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
All human accomplishment has this 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
It was not really Saturday night, at least it may have been, for they had long lost count of the days; but always if they wanted to do anything special they said this was Saturday night, and then they did it.
— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
If there is a deity of the kind imagined by votaries of the big mail-order religions such as Christianity and Islam, and if this deity is the creator of all things, then it is responsible for cancer, meningitis, millions of spontaneous abortions everyday, mass killings of people in floods and earthquakes-and too great mountain of other natural evils to list besides. It would also,as the putative designer of human nature, ultimately be responsible or the ubiquitous and unbeatable human propensities for hatred, malice, greed, and all other sources of the cruelty and murder people inflict on each other hourly.
— A.C. Grayling
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Truly, there is magic in fairy
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.
— Anne Lamott
The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.
— Marcel Proust
your brain is wider than the sky
— Emily Dickinson
The faery lords are immortal. Those who have songs ballads and stories written about them never die. Belief worship imagination we were born of the dreams and fears of mortals and if we are remembered even in some small way we will always exist.
— Julie Kagawa, The Iron King
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention aand innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared. Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
— J.K. Rowling
A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
— Raymond Chandler, Pearls are a Nuisance
Consciousness, unprovable by scientific standards, is forever, then, the impossible phantom in the predictable biologic machine, and your every thought a genuine supernatural event. Your every thought is a ghost, dancing.
— Alan Moore, Promethea, Vol. 5
Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
An imagination is a powerful tool. It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice... or terrify, all depending upon how we conduct ourselves today. 
— Jim Davis
Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought—making onself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share—it smashed to atoms.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino said, ‘when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,’ he said, ‘to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.
— Umberto Eco, Baudolino
Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet 
— Fernando Pessoa
As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.
— Mervyn Peake
We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.
— Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
We may seem the weakest and most insignificant of all the Realms, but our strength comes in other ways. We have what no other race has: imagination. Any one of us, even the lowliest, can create worlds within ourselves; we can people them with the most extraordinary creatures, the most amazing inventions, the most incredible things. We can live in those worlds ourselves, if we choose; and in our own worlds, we can be as we want to be. Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead, Poison, for in imagination, we can create wonders.
— Chris Wooding, Poison
What year is it in your imagination?
— Lynda Barry, What It Is
To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.
— Thomas Henry Huxley
It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
Imagination is the politics of dreams
—  imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. . . . Imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed
The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language.Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word.
— Alan Moore, Promethea, Vol. 5
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
— J.K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage.
— Stephen King, The Dark Tower
As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe.
— Libba Bray, Going Bovine
Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revi
— Stephen King
Imagine the clouds drippingDig a hole in your garden to put them in
— Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings
Reality can be entered through the main door or it can be slipped into through a window, which is much more fun.
— Gianni Rodari, The Grammar Of Fantasy: An Introduction To The Art Of Inventing Stories
Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.
— Louis Aragón
Do people ever climb the demon towers? Like, for any reason?" Aline looked up. "Climb the demon towers?" She laughed. "No, no one ever does that. It's totally illegal, for one thing, and besides, why would you want to?" Aline, Isabelle thought, did not have much imagination. She herself could think of lots of reasons why someone might want to climb the demon towers, if only to spit gum down on passerbys below.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.
— J.K. Rowling
Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams.
— Clark Ashton Smith, The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith
Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!
— Alfred de Musset, Fantasio
Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.
— Patricia McCormick, Sold
I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel
— Peter Nivio Zarlenga
Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.
— William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell
Keep in mind that imagination is at the heart of all innovation. Crush or constrain it and the fun will vanish.
— Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
I think repressing what happened is what saved me in my childhood. I was able to use my imagination to create happy events, but a little girl can carry only so much on her own.
— Erin Merryn, Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness
We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings
I love the process of being taken from where I am to somewhere else.
— Josephine Jacobsen
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life.
— Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
That's the beginning of magic. Let your imagination run and follow it.
— Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn
To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader & the Imagination
I begin by imagining The impossibleAnd end by accomplishingThe impossible.
— Sri Chinmoy, Sri Chinmoy's Heart Garden: A Book of Aphorisms for Joy and Inspiration
Memory is imagination in reverse.
— Stephen Evans, The Marriage of True Minds
Because, when everything else is gone, all we're left with is our imaginations.
— Sarra Manning, Adorkable
Sometimes even the imagination lets one down.
— Mary Balogh, Simply Magic
Like all stories of creators who bring life from the dead, his story began with a struggling butcher, who chased a gray cat, caught it, took off its studded collar, and slit its throat.
— Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it - and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended - a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.
— Jorge Luis Borges
The danger of abusing the discovery of the truth value of imagination for retrogressive tendencies is exemplified by the work of Carl Jung. More empathically than Freud, he has insisted on the cognitive force of imagination. According to Jung, phantasy is ‘undistinguishably’ united with all other mental functions, it appears ‘now as primeval, now as the ultimate and most audacious synthesis of all capabilities.’ Phantasy is above all the ‘creative activity out of which flow the answers to all answerable questions’; it is ‘the mother of all possibilities, in which all mental opposites as well as the conflict between internal and external world are united.’ Phantasy has always built the bridge between the irreconcilable demands of object and subject, extroversion and introversion. The simultaneously retrospective and expectant character of imagination is thus clearly stated: it looks not only back to an aboriginal golden past, but also forward to still unrealized but realizable possibilities.
— Herbert Marcuse
IV   The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.V   If the many become the same as the few, when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man.VI   If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.VII   The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.
— William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose
When weary with the long day’s care,And earthly change from pain to pain,And lost, and ready to despair,Thy kind voice calls me back againO my true friend, I am not loneWhile thou canst speak with such a tone!So hopeless is the world without,The world within I doubly prize;Thy world where guile and hate and doubtAnd cold suspicion never rise;Where thou and I and LibertyHave undisputed sovereignty.What matters it that all aroundDanger and grief and darkness lie,If but within our bosom’s boundWe hold a bright unsullied sky,Warm with ten thousand mingled raysOf suns that know no winter days?Reason indeed may oft complainFor Nature’s sad reality,And tell the suffering heart how vainIts cherished dreams must always be;And Truth may rudely trample downThe flowers of Fancy newly blown.But thou art ever there to bringThe hovering visions back and breatheNew glories o’er the blighted springAnd call a lovelier life from death,And whisper with a voice divineOf real worlds as bright as thine.I trust not to thy phantom bliss,Yet still in evening’s quiet hourWith never-failing thankfulness Iwelcome thee, benignant power,Sure solacer of human caresAnd brighter hope when hope despairs.
— Emily Brontë
And who cares for imagination? Who does not think it a rather dangerous, senseless attribute, akin to weakness, perhaps partaking of frenzy - a disease rather than a gift of the mind?Probably all think it so but those who possess, or fancy they possess it. To hear them speak, you would believe that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter, which you do not feel. All illusion, of course; but the fanatics cling to their dream, and would not give it for gold.
— Charlotte Brontë
...I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she did-took electronic readings on her and calculated they weren't built to handle something like this on the ward, and just burned out, like machines committing suicide.
— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
…growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination
— H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly