c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.
— Franklin Pierce Adams
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Vision - It reaches beyond the thing that is, into the conception of what can be. Imagination gives you the picture. Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own.
— Robert Collier
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
— Noam Chomsky
I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
— Keith Haring
What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.
— Jeffrey Katzenberg
You will certainly not doubt the necessity of studying astronomy and physics, if you are desirous of comprehending the relation between the world and Providence as it is in reality, and not according to imagination.
— Maimonides
My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.
— Jessica Hagedorn
In imagination, there's no limitation.
— Mark Victor Hansen
It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.
— Geraldine Brooks
Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
— Abraham Verghese
We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage. Jesus and the early Christians had a marvelous political imagination. They turned all the presumptions and ideas of power and blessing upside down.
— Shane Claiborne
From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.
— Geoffrey S. Fletcher
Cinema is a world of imagination.
— Marjane Satrapi
America gave the world the notion of the melting pot - an alchemical cooking device wherein diverse ethnic and religious groups voluntarily mix together, producing a new, American identity. And while critics may argue that the melting pot is a national myth, it has tenaciously informed the America's collective imagination.
— Ivan Krastev
Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.
— Taylor Swift
Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.
— Ray Bradbury
'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion.
— John le Carre
I have a visual imagination.
— Sylvia Plath
Of the things which nourish the imagination, humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it.
— John Millington Synge
My inspiration comes from so many things, it is hard to give credit to one. I find music of all kinds to be a great inspiration. A melody or a lyric can fire my imagination. Exercise is another. Endorphins fuel my thoughts - I tend to work out scenes and dialogue when I am exercising. Reading is also a great inspiration.
— Julia London
No breed of cats in its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even slightly ungraceful - a record against which must be pitted the depressing spectacle of impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously shapeless and shaggy Airedales, and the like.
— H. P. Lovecraft
Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.
— Jim Harrison
Imagination decides everything.
— Blaise Pascal
A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate.
— Donald Trump
I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.
— Carlos Fuentes
I love audio books, and when I paint I'm always listening to a book. I find that my imagination really takes flight in the painting process when I'm listening to audio books.
— Thomas Kinkade
Without imagination, there can be no genuine ardor in any pursuit or for any acquisition, and without imagination, there can be no genuine morality, no profound feeling of other men's sorrow, no ardent and persevering anxiety for their interests.
— William Godwin
The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
— Salman Rushdie
If you're trying to learn how to act from a class, you're analyzing the teachers' movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that's wrong. Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin. It's your own imagination, and your own version of it.
— Shia LaBeouf
There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.
— Twyla Tharp
When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from.
— Neil Gaiman
The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.
— Pete Hamill
I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
— Meryl Streep
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
— Will Self
If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.
— Michael Ignatieff
Loving a country is an act of the imagination.
— Michael Ignatieff
You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place.
— Robert J. Sawyer
I like crafts that come out of poverty or necessity. There used to be hobby shops where you'd get your supplies, and then you'd use your imagination.
— Amy Sedaris
There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can't even fight against because they've been there so long that they've become part of the Western imagination of China.
— Ken Liu
Growing up in a suburban home, the world seems so massive to you. It seems like cities are so big and so far away, and there's so much in them. So your imagination runs wild, instead of when you are born in the middle of Manhattan, you'd know, like, that this is the biggest city.
— Shawn Mendes
As long as I was well fed, I was a very, very nice child. I just used my imagination and played with Barbies. I was pretty easy.
— Sabrina Carpenter
The greatest gift you have been given is the gift of your imagination - what do you dream of wanting to do?
— Amanda Lindhout
A lot of these liberal churches that harbor illegal immigrants who are criminals say they are following the example of Jesus. They are following the Jesus of their imagination rather than the Jesus of the Bible.
— Robert Jeffress
Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
— Philip Roth
Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.
— Pat Conroy
Gender fluidity is not really feeling like you're at one end of the spectrum or the other. For the most part, I definitely don't identify as any gender. I'm not a guy; I don't really feel like a woman, but obviously I was born one. So, I'm somewhere in the middle, which - in my perfect imagination - is like having the best of both sexes.
— Ruby Rose
Growing up, I had a very vivid imagination and Leonardo was like my best imaginary friend that I spoke to. When things were tough, or I was scared in an unsafe environment, I always imagined that the Ninja Turtles would come to the rescue.
— Ruby Rose
There are no shortcuts in life - only those we imagine.
— Frank Leahy
Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey.
— Jerry Spinelli
To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.
— John Burroughs
A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.
— William Morris
All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.
— Jay S. Walker
The imagination of our children is blunted on television, and their thinking is done for them.
— Stanley R. Jaffe
It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.
— Peter Ackroyd
When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.
— Alejandro Jodorowsky
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
— Richard Dawkins
I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
— John Irving
Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.
— Francis Spufford
A man, to carry on a successful business, must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. A man can cultivate this faculty only by an appreciation of the finer things in life.
— Charles M. Schwab
People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can't do.
— Gretchen Rubin
You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.
— Alan Greenspan
I don't think that people should wear dresses two sizes too small. I just think that sexiness is better left to the imagination. It's just more tasteful.
— Rachel Zoe
Cooking with kids is not just about ingredients, recipes, and cooking. It's about harnessing imagination, empowerment, and creativity.
— Guy Fieri
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.
— Thomas Jefferson
I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.
— C. S. Lewis
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.
— William Shakespeare
Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.
— Bruce Catton
Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
— Ernest Hemingway
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
— Carl Jung
Don't stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want - freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.
— James Altucher
I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.
— Billy Connolly
Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.
— Jerry Saltz
Sometimes a technology is so awe-inspiring that the imagination runs away with it - often far, far away from reality. Robots are like that. A lot of big and ultimately unfulfilled promises were made in robotics early on, based on preliminary successes.
— Daniel H. Wilson
I have a good imagination. Look, I know what it feels like to have a broken heart. I know what it feels like to feel something for somebody. I'm just too weird to be in a relationship.
— Diane Warren
The World Series is played in my doubtless too-nostalgic imagination in some kind of autumn afternoon light, and seeing it exclusively in the bitter chill of midnight breaks the spell of even the best of games.
— Adam Gopnik
I think growing up on a farm in a certain amount of isolation, with not a lot of friends nearby, makes you entertain yourself and kind of grows your imagination - being alone is quite good for all that. You make up stories, talk to the animals, let them be an audience, a bunch of cows.
— Kristen Schaal
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
— Albert Einstein
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.
— Vladimir Nabokov
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?
— Marquis de Sade
People can die of mere imagination.
— Geoffrey Chaucer
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing.
— Quincy Jones
Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.
— Bill Hicks
I'm a dreamer with lots of energy and a vivid imagination. That's the recipe for becoming an entertainer.
— Goldie Hawn
Hypnosis is about shutting down the conscious mind and re-igniting the unconscious and the imagination, so while I give instructions to them under hypnosis, the contestants might interpret those instructions in all kinds of ways.
— Keith Barry
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
— Ray Bradbury
I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.
— Beverly Cleary
I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.
— Brit Marling
Mostly, I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
— Tom Waits
Living in a small town, one of the keys to survival was your imagination.
— Nick Nolte
Who cares about the men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms? How ironic that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination.
— Rose George
Men often take their imagination for their heart and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.
— Blaise Pascal
It would be too frightening for me to consider myself a role model. But I like the idea of not being afraid of letting your imagination rule you, to feel the freedom of expression, to let creativity be your overwhelming drive rather than other things.
— Florence Welch
When I got large enough to go to work, while employed I was reflecting on many things that would present themselves to my imagination; and whenever an opportunity occurred of looking at a book, when the school-children were getting their lessons, I would find many things that the fertility of my own imagination had depicted to me before.
— Nat Turner
America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.
— Elizabeth Bowen
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.
— Isaac Newton
I still find it quite easy to find my way into a child's imagination. We're all Peter Pan ourselves in some respects. Everybody should keep some grip on childhood, even as a grownup.
— Tim Curry
In your imagination, you can perfect things in a way you can't do in your everyday life.
— Washed Out
You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.
— Charles de Gaulle
Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.
— Christian Nestell Bovee
Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.
— Marcus Aurelius
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
— Anais Nin
One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.
— Alan Rickman
The openness of rural Nebraska certainly influenced me. That openness, in a way, fosters the imagination. But growing up, Lincoln wasn't a small town. It was a college town. It had record stores and was a liberal place.
— Matthew Sweet
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
— Martha Gellhorn
I used my imagination to make the grass whatever color I wanted it to be.
— Whoopi Goldberg
The woman who appeals to a man's vanity may stimulate him, the woman who appeals to his heart may attract him, but it is the woman who appeals to his imagination who gets him.
— Helen Rowland
When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.
— Tim Berners-Lee
What's in front of you is a whole world of experiences beyond your imagination. Put yourself, and your growth and development, first.
— Phylicia Rashad
I'm always easily frightened and I hate being scared. I've never been able to go on the haunted house rides at carnivals of anything like that my imagination just takes over! 
— Caity Lotz
In a rehearsal room, your real resource as an actor aren't the things around you; your resources are your imagination and your director and the other actors. In those close quarters, your imagination and your skills are what you turn to.
— Stephen Lang
The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'
— Tom Robbins
I'm attracted to stories that excite my imagination, stories that, as I'm reading the script, I feel it, I can see it, I can hear the characters. I'm attracted to characters that are real, that tap into something inside me that I haven't explored yet.
— Tatiana Maslany
To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
— Bill Gates
If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.
— Margo Jefferson
I was always extremely creative. I was very artistic and never strong with numbers or science. I wanted to be an artist or a fashion designer. I wanted to be something that allowed for a lot of imagination.
— Whitney Wolfe
My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
— John Adams
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
— Henry James
The source and center of all man's creative power... is his power of making images, or the power of imagination.
— Robert Collier
The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy.
— Virginia Postrel
Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.
— Rita Dove
I think life is about having the mixture of the curiosity of an older person and the imagination of a child.
— Daphne Guinness
Woman is the sun, an extraordinary creature, one that makes the imagination gallop.
— Marcello Mastroianni
One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.
— Ella Maillart
Vulgarity begins when imagination succumbs to the explicit.
— Doris Day
I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.
— Paul Theroux
Some stories are true that never happened.
— Elie Wiesel
Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.
— Stephen Leacock
The human mind evolved always in the company of the human body, and of the animal body before it was human. The intricate connections of mind and body must exceed our imagination, as from our point of view we are peculiarly prevented from observing them.
— John Desmond Bernal
I've spent my life butting my head against other people's lack of imagination.
— Nick Cave
Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.
— John Adams
You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.
— Jerry Gillies
One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination.
— Sam Levenson
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
— William C. Bryant
You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination.
— Larry McMurtry
My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.
— John Henrik Clarke
To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.
— Frank Auerbach
Dr. Einstein was not successful in school, but he found something in the air from his own imagination and his own brain power, and look what he did.
— Eartha Kitt
I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do.
— Trevor Nunn
Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.
— Jack Prelutsky
I loved the world of imagination.
— R. A. Salvatore
Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.
— Lily Tomlin
Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.
— Rod Serling
He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
— Washington Irving
The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.
— Elizabeth Drew
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
— Ishmael Reed
But I'm never gonna get to a point in my life where what it costs to shoot a movie is going to determine what it is. The limits of my imagination is the only thing that's gonna stop me.
— Abel Ferrara
I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
— Terry Pratchett
I was raised not to be afraid to show emotion or imagination.
— Javier Bardem
Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind's eye. That's an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition.
— Joshua Foer
With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.
— Terrence McNally
I grew up believing my sister was from the planet Neptune and had been sent down to Earth to kill me. I believed this because my sister Emily convinced me of it when I was a toddler. I think she'd seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers and her imagination ran away with her. There's a part of me that still believes it.
— Zooey Deschanel
Students are rewarded for memorization, not imagination or resourcefulness.
— Sugata Mitra
Games are the way we keep romance alive. They're based in human hardwiring. Playing hard-to-get or leaving a little to the imagination allows the woman to be wooed and appreciated and the man to be challenged and intrigued.
— Helen Fisher
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
— Salman Rushdie
Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination.
— James Cameron
Your heart will be shattered by sorrow if you force it to live in tomorrow's ephemeral imagination - world instead of in today's eternal reality - now.
— Sri Chinmoy
I always have this imagination, something I want to use. I don't understand the idea of leisure time.
— Cher Wang
Some music comes from a real place; some music comes from your imagination. It's difficult to find out what's real and what's not, especially with the gangster stuff.
— Ice T
I've got an overactive brain. I enjoy work, I enjoy life, and I'm not good at relaxing. I've also never slept very much due to this overactive imagination and my brain constantly thinking.
— Rick Wakeman
Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.
— Ridley Scott
The fictive structure, my work, my imagination, my books are about the details, the huge construction about culture, Islamic culture or modern Turkey. They're all intertwined.
— Orhan Pamuk
People seem to have trouble with the imagination. They can't believe that you can just pull things out of your brain like that.
— Edward P. Jones
Using my imagination and creativity is exciting to me.
— Jan de Bont
I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads - in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation - that if I really want to change my life, I might best begin by changing my mind.
— Pico Iyer
Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.
— Oscar Wilde
I get ideas from my own personal experiences, from my imagination, and from my research and from old stories.
— Mary Pope Osborne
Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.
— Wayne Dyer
Although technology has enhanced our lives in many ways, it has also ensured the erosion of imagination.
— Alexandra Adornetto
I get irritated with the world. I get irritated with politicians. I get very irritated with governments and with corporations, but in terms of imagination - my imagination is always fertile. I'm either thinking of my own things or constantly engaged by the things that other people do.
— Patti Smith
Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes.
— Steve Erickson
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.
— H. P. Lovecraft
I think acting is a work of imagination.
— Elodie Yung
The writer's goal is to try to make it frightening without describing it too much, and yet not making it so grey that you don't know what's going on... Your imagination can imagine all sorts of really horrible things, and if you're able to prolong that feeling, then you've succeeded.
— Arthur Slade
I always struggle with making the technical aspects of the plot fit with the story that's unfolding in my imagination.
— Deborah Raney
People are always saying it's the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, it's a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, it's a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.
— John Ralston Saul
Children depend mightily on animals for comfort, inspiration, imagination, and art. And parents have long recognized this.
— Lydia Millet
The public has an appetite for anything about imagination - anything that is as far away from reality as is creatively possible.
— Steven Spielberg
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
— Doris Lessing
Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.
— Alan Bennett
'Harry Potter' really harnessed the imagination of so many young-adult minds, and it's the same with the 'Divergent' series.
— Kate Winslet
The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
— Oscar Wilde
You have to come in and be that character when you walk into the room. That's what one of my first acting teachers taught me. You know, don't go in there being Jennifer and then expect to flip and change, because they're not going to have that imagination.
— Jennifer Lopez
Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
— Cyril Connolly
If we find it hard to believe that winning millions might not be so lucky after all, we just don't have a good enough imagination. If I fantasise about winning the lottery, it doesn't take long before all sorts of worrisome potential consequences occur to me.
— Julian Baggini
My hope is that this life is not all there is. This life is like preparation for what is coming next, and what is coming next is something so glorious that the Bible says minds can't conceive it, eye has never seen, your imagination could never even enter into all that God is preparing for those who love him.
— Anne Graham Lotz
I just have a relationship with my imagination. It's like my friend, almost.
— Steven Wright
I don't feel there's any reason to apologise for having a wicked imagination. I think it's important as a maker of fantasy and of horror.
— Clive Barker
With its imagination and large sales, Apple has become the world's most valuable IT company. However people are starting to have doubts regarding Apple's silence on heavy metal pollution problems.
— Ma Jun
Never, and I mean never, allow anyone else's ideas of who you can or can't become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a 'Keep Out' sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination.
— Wayne Dyer
I don't believe my house was haunted. I think I had an overactive imagination, and I was so convinced that those around me became convinced, too.
— Ryan Gosling
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.
— Carl Jung
I had an incredibly full life with my imagination: I used to have all sorts of trolls and things; I had a wonderful world around my toys and invented people. I don't mean I had imaginary friends; I just had this big imagination thing going on. I didn't need any imaginary friends, because I had so much other stuff going on.
— Kate Bush
I feel like my imagination was crafted by Tolkien. He seemed to tap into that childhood intrigue of secret doors and hidden worlds.
— Richard C. Armitage
In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.
— Pico Iyer
I didn't like Barbie dolls, so I used to have this overactive imagination, and I used to pretend to be all these different things. My weird childhood fetishes seem to have come to life now as an actor.
— Sonam Kapoor
People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.
— Tom Robbins
In my wildest imagination, I never thought that the fifth of six children born to Helen and Buddy Watts - in a poor black neighborhood, in the poor rural community of Eufaula, Oklahoma - would someday be called Congressman.
— J. C. Watts
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.
— Amy Bloom
The novel and the film of 'The Color Purple' are both works of the imagination that make claim to historical truth.
— Darryl Pinckney
It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.
— Alexander McCall Smith
We especially need imagination in science.
— Maria Mitchell
I probably became an actor because of my vivid imagination, and doing voice-over really sort of takes me back to that.
— Eric Stonestreet
It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
— Henry David Thoreau
I feel very lucky to make a living from my imagination I'm very grateful for that. I like that what I do is create. I'm feeling very lucky to have had the career I had. It's gone much longer and bigger than I ever thought it would be.
— Steven Wright
People may think I'm trying something new by telling stories, but they're just jokes connected to give the illusion of stories. But really, I just continue using my imagination and creating. That's what I do.
— Steven Wright
When I started the Imagination Library in my hometown, I never dreamed that one day we would be helping Scottish kids.
— Dolly Parton
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
— Salman Rushdie
Reading has been the fuel of my motivation: it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued.
— Zig Ziglar
Few people have the imagination for reality.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.
— Samuel Johnson
Experience teaches that when the will and imagination are in conflict, the imagination usually wins. What we imagine may defeat our reason and make us slaves to what we taste, see, hear, smell, and feel in the mind's eye. The body is indeed the servant of the mind.
— Joseph B. Wirthlin
The human race is governed by its imagination.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
I've done a lot of bad things. Use your imagination.
— Katy Perry
Taste refers to the past, imagination to the future.
— Mason Cooley
Imagination has rules, but we can only guess what they are.
— Mason Cooley
Ray Bradbury is one who is contributing to the understanding of the imagination and the curiosity of the human race.
— Buzz Aldrin
I can't satisfy myself with just trying to tie all of my imagination into music, especially when music is not appreciated as an art form as much as it used to be.
— Marilyn Manson
Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.
— John Updike
Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.
— Howard Jacobson
Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?
— Howard Jacobson
While the sciences are hugely important, let us not leave behind a child's imagination.
— Kevin Spacey
I always felt that what is scary is actually hearing someone tell you what they think they see. That sense of invisibility makes things a lot scarier, since your imagination tends to fill in the gaps.
— James Wan
We can conceive of eternity because we cannot conceive of a cessation of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest star and see infinite space beyond.
— Robert Green Ingersoll
My problem is that my imagination won't turn off. I wake up so excited I can't eat breakfast. I've never run out of energy. It's not like OPEC oil I don't worry about a premium going on my energy. It's just always been there. I got it from my mom. 
— Steven Spielberg
We are all innovators, we all like to use our imagination, which is our greatest tool.
— Cory Booker
Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities.
— Orison Swett Marden
Believing you're something that you're not excites the mind and the imagination. And it's hopeful.
— Orlando Bloom
I've always had a slightly overactive imagination.
— Daniel Radcliffe
Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.
— Deepak Chopra
We're living in a time when the world has suddenly discovered India because it's run out of raw material for its imagination. The raw materials for imagination are inexhaustible here.
— Deepak Chopra
Being on a trapeze is like dreaming. I feel totally outside of myself when I'm flying. You know, designing shoes, my imagination is flying in my drawings.
— Christian Louboutin
I always appreciated the magnitude of my mother's imagination. She always saw beauty in what was broken, and she'd preserve it.
— Blake Lively
I know there's been a lot that's been said about animated voice work, as though it's 'you can do this in your jeans and there's no camera and no pressure there. It's no big deal. It's easy.' The truth is, it's really a great test: how deep is your ability is to access your imagination?
— Nicolas Cage
Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.
— Nicolas Cage
Often you hear stories about never working with children. I disagree because children still have that residual magical thinking. They haven't had their imagination knocked out of them by turning into adults and life experiences.
— Nicolas Cage
I tend to like to read history - recent history, because I find that much more intriguing than just a writer's imagination.
— Jesse Ventura
Doubt is the father of invention.
— Ambrose Bierce
Liberty: One of Imagination's most precious possessions.
— Ambrose Bierce
I use so much of myself in everything I do. I think every actor does because you have no one else to go to but yourself and your own imagination.
— Pierce Brosnan
Free enterprise empowers entrepreneurs who have ideas and imagination, investors who take risks, and workers who hone their skills and offer their labor.
— Paul Ryan
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
— Thomas Carlyle
Imagination is a pretty powerful thing, and when you're in the moment and you're riding a train and you're asked to look scared, I don't know, it just kind of works out. And in those moments where you're actually doing some of the stunts, then it's not so hard at all, because there's an actual fear there.
— Chris Pine
I came from a childhood where I spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time just living with my imagination, and a certain amount of the adult world was kind of alienating.
— Chris Cornell
There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would imagine because I think it's the body where the imagination lives somehow. I do feel the imagination isn't just in the brain up there.
— Michael Leunig
I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back?
— Christina Aguilera
No film has captivated my imagination more than 'King Kong.' I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old.
— Peter Jackson
'The Lord of the Rings,' published in the mid-1950s, was intended as a prehistory to our own world. It was perceived by Tolkien to be a small but significant episode in a vast alternate mythology constructed entirely out of his own imagination.
— Peter Jackson
Because of my faith and my imagination, I was able to enjoy my childhood, even though it was tough.
— Donna Brazile
I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone; because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman.
— Claire Danes
I've always had a really active imagination. Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Mine just took on a rather demonic form.
— Claire Danes
There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
— Edmund Burke
But if I have a lot of imagination, I could tell myself whatever I wanted, you know. I handle myself quite well. I'm kind of fascist with myself, you know. There's no discussion. There is an order. You follow it.
— Karl Lagerfeld
I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination.
— Bruce Springsteen
I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
— Thomas Sowell
Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.
— Joyce Carol Oates
There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.
— William Godwin
There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.
— William Godwin
There is nothing that human imagination can figure brilliant and enviable that human genius and skill do not aspire to realize.
— William Godwin
I'd stand on the side of the road when I was just a little girl singing on trash cans. People would roll down their windows saying, 'Isn't she cute'. I had a vivid imagination. I always pretended it was some big stage.
— Missy Elliott
My imagination is so far out there already. People couldn't imagine what goes on in my brain.
— Missy Elliott
The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.
— Virginia Postrel
'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.
— Junot Diaz
Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly.
— James Surowiecki
There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.
— Isabel Allende
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
— William Hazlitt