c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Where there is a monster, there is a miracle.
— Ogden Nash
... people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2
If this were a proper world, beautiful faces would belong to beautiful people. Good people with kind hearts and clever minds would always have bright eyes and dazzling smiles, and bad people would have scraggly hair and warty noses. That way if you saw one of them coming, you could cross to the other side of the street and avoid them altogether. But this is not a proper world. In our world, many bad people look quite nice, and many good people are not beautiful at all. Many good people aren't pretty or cute or even interesting-looking.
— Brit Trogen, Margaret and the Moth Tree
A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
I live in two unique worlds, traveling between both with just the opening or closing of my eyes.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything God-like about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
— Henry Miller, Sexus
It is because of this sea between us. The earth has never, up to now, separated us. But, ever since yesterday, there has been something in this nonetheless real, perfectly Atlantic, salty, slightly rough sea that has cast a spell on me. And every time I think about Promethea, I see her crossing this great expanse by boat and soon, alas, a storm comes up, my memory clouds over, in a flash there are shipwrecks, I cannot even cry out, my mouth is full of saltwater sobs. I am flooded with vague, deceptive recollections, I am drowning in my imagination in tears borrowed from the most familiar tragedies, I wish I had never read certain books whose poison is working in me. Has this Friday, perhaps, thrown a spell on me? But spells only work if you catch them. I have caught the Tragic illness. If only Promethea would make me some tea I know I would find some relief. But that is exactly what is impossible. And so, today, I am sinning. I am sinking beneath reality. I am weighted down with literature. That is my fate. Yet I had the presence of mind to start this parenthesis, the only healthy moment in these damp, feverish hours. All this to try to come back to the surface of our book... Phone me quickly, Promethea, get me out of this parenthesis fast!)
— Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea
As inexplicable as the accidents that set it off, our imagination is a crucial privilege. I've tried my whole life simply to accept the images that present themselves to me without trying to analyze them. I remember when we were shooting That Obscure Object of Desire in Seville and I suddenly found myself telling Fernando Rey, at the end of a scene, to pick up a big sack filled with tools lying on a bench, sling it over his shoulder, and walk away. The action was completely irrational, yet it seemed absolutely right to me. Still, I was worried about it, so I shot two versions of the scene: one with the sack, one without. But during the rushes the following day, the whole crew agreed that the scene was much better with the sack. Why? I can't explain it, and I don't enjoy rummaging around in the cliches of psychoanalysis.
— Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh
His so-fucking-vivid imagination rarely gave him the horrors, but when it did, God help him. God help him once it was warmed up. It was not only warmed up now, it was hot and running on full choke. That there was no sense at all in what he was thinking made not a whit of difference in the dark. In the dark, rationality seemed stupid and logic a dream. In the dark he thought with his skin.
— Stephen King, Misery
At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.
— Isabel Allende, Eva Luna
Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.
— Jonas Salk
I want to get lost in other worlds and let my imagination travel beyond this life I know.
— Jen Naumann, Shymers
Erotic Romance is a complete women thing.. by the women for the women.. Men don't even have an idea where women's imaginations can reach..!
— Himmilicious
Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.
— Van Wyck Brooks
The seed of an urban legend find fertile soil at the corner of tragedy and imagination.
— Thomm Quackenbush, We Shadows
Only worry about what you absolutely know about,' Mr. Worthington said to me, putting my mind back where it belonged. 'That's the key. Worrying about anything else is just a waste of time and emotion. I know that seems obvious but honestly, the more information you have, the less your imagination can run away with you so the secret is to find out as much as you can about what your particular problem is....and you'll be amazed at how this simplifies things. You no longer have to worry about the what ifs.
— Sarah-Kate Lynch, On Top of Everything
Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.
— Dallas Willard
He had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more interesting than ever before. She lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him curious fancies and reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one's imagination; that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never bored him.
— Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
10.	Never allow your imagination to stop. It was the imagination of great people that brought us the internet, the pyramids, cars, airplanes, boats, great novels, beautiful painting, classical songs, great movies, water irrigation, solar panels, the statue of liberty, the wall of china and so forth. Never under estimate your imagination.
— Tasha Hoggatt
The forces of the sea give rise to imagination, which reflects them according to the nature and disposition of the perceiver. The sea itself is undifferentiated and without bias.
— F.T. McKinstry, The Gray Isles
Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond, I read about them and I tried to imagine what they would be like ... When I saw a real diamond in a lady's ring one day I was so disappointed I cried. Of course, it was very lovely but it wasn't my idea of a diamond.
— L.M. Montgomery
...it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising out memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room
— Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
Better to have to retrace your steps and then move forward than never to move forward at all.
— Anne Burack Sayre, The Birthday Book Club Snatching: The Melinda & Simon Series
Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.
— C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
Words have the greatest power to inflict everlasting pain. Words have the greatest power to heal the soul.
— Aneta Cruz
Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.
— Nick Hornby, About a Boy
The imaginative is produced by the human mind as it tries to respond to something greater than itself, struggling to find images adequate to the reality.
— C. S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.
— Jostein Gaarder, The Ringmaster's Daughter
Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons.  Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, and supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill.
— Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Once you realize that the imagination is non-fiction, the world is yours
— Carl Henegan, Darkness Left Undone
The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ’s so I’m constantly aware of, and respect that. I have a tendency to give my readers vivid descriptions of panoramic viewpoints, soft breezes, and the late evening as it scrapes against the emerging night and present this step by suspenseful step. Once I get them to the threshold of that unseen cliff, I shove them off and say, take it from there.
— Carl Henegan, Darkness Left Undone
The highway of human possibility extends on forever into unknown territories, which have not yet been imagined.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
By using repetition, images, and other strategies - all of which communicate truths in ways that are not cognitively or propositional - marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or to buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. It is important to appreciate that these disciplinary mechanisms transmit values and truth claims, but not via propositions or cognitive means; rather, the values are transmitted more covertly...This covertness of the operation is also what makes it so powerful: the truths are inscribed in us through the powerful instruments of imagination and ritual.
— James K.A. Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church
There is a brilliant novel in all of us. Some imagine it…others live it. Authors dwell in an auspicious life by having the ability to fuse the two.
— Carl Henegan
We're all entitled to our different likes and dislikes. Imagine the world if we all liked the same things.
— Malia Ann Haberman, Chase Tinker and the House of Magic (Chase Tinker, #1)'
This is the Self-Esteem Looking-Glass. You have to look in the mirror and compliment yourself.
— Malia Ann Haberman, Chase Tinker and the House of Magic (Chase Tinker, #1)'
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...
— Joseph Conrad
Lo, which a greet thing is affeccioun!Men may die of imaginacioun,So depe may impressioun be take.
— Geoffrey Chaucer
Most of the time it may seem like I'm staring into nothingness, but there's a whole world playing out in my head.
— Aneta Cruz
I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities – as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer.
— Thomas Hardy
Without imagination, there would be no creativity. Without creativity, there would be nothing.
— Aneta Cruz
Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist.
— Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon
He imagines Owens' body dotted with saltwater reservoirs just below the skin. An entire wetland, populated with tiny fish and birds, thriving in his agitation. A species of dwarf crocodile lazing beside an artery.
— Lisa Lang, Utopian Man
Yeah, right. Instead of watching TV, we'll practice our weird magical powers. Great. What's next? Zooming around on flying carpets?
— Malia Ann Haberman, Chase Tinker and the House of Magic (Chase Tinker, #1)'
Good stories take your imagination to anywhere
— Raphaela Mello, Dragons' Rescue
Words are beads on the strings of sentences. So make a beautiful necklace!
— Aneta Cruz
You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.
— Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
We may see a Creature with forty-nine headsWho lives in the desolate snow,And whenever he catches a cold (which he dreads)He has forty-nine noses to blow.'We may see the venomous Pink-Spotted ScrunchWho can chew up a man with one bite.It likes to eat five of them roasted for lunchAnd eighteen for its supper at night.'We may see a Dragon, and nobody knowsThat we won't see a Unicorn there.We may see a terrible Monster with toesGrowing out of the tufts of his hair.'We may see the sweet little Biddy-Bright HenSo playful, so kind and well-bred;And such beautiful eggs! You just boil them and thenThey explode and they blow off your head.'A Gnu and a Gnocerous surely you'll seeAnd that gnormous and gnorrible GnatWhose sting when it stings you goes in at the kneeAnd comes out through the top of your hat.'We may even get lost and be frozen by frost.We may die in an earthquake or tremor.Or nastier still, we may even be tossedOn the horns of a furious Dilemma.'But who cares! Let us go from this horrible hill!Let us roll! Let us bowl! Let us plunge!Let's go rolling and bowling and spinning untilWe're away from old Spiker and Sponge!
— Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach
To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path
— Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
May you see the world with wonder. And may you imagine only good things.
— Charlene Costanzo, The Twelve Gifts for Healing
Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.He was. He was going to shake hands with death.He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.("3 Kills For 1")
— Cornell Woolrich, Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich
The eighth gift is Imagination. May it nourish your visions and dreams.
— Charlene Costanzo, The Twelve Gifts of Birth
He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.
— Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Your mind is your greatest power. Use it well.
— Aneta Cruz
Even our recreation was scheduled. There was no time to look for birds or wander into the nearby woods. We were put into teams and sent into violent pursuit of a helpless ball.
— Gloria Whelan, Listening for Lions
I could write paper people and I would love them too
—  I could make them almost real.
Use your imagination," I tell my students these days, "or someone else is going to use it for you.
— Ronald Sukenick, Down and in: Life in the Underground
The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.
— Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
An idea weighs nothing, except on the mind.
— A.T. Baron
If I do not personify God, you call me an atheist. But I do not personify God because I refuse to limit God to the boundaries of my imagination... or yours.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
I seek to be moved, my imagination reborn.Let me feast on poems that feed my hunger.
— Susie Clevenger, Dirt Road Dreams
Imagination is a place where all the important answers live.
— Joe Meno
To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music,...is finally the most inward of acts--so inward that even language, even the language of thought, can come to seem intrusive...After all these procedures the unbreachable mysteriousness of music remains intact. The book can never be more than an interruption. Afterward, the listening begins again, to generate, in turn, other and completely different books.
— Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox
show me your eyes and i should tell who you are and what would your future
— Mohamed Khadra, Regulatory Failure and the Global Financial Crisis: An Australian Perspective
He wanted Jordan so badly, his fantasies consumed him. Whenever he reached out to touch something, paper, the phone, his steering wheel, there was a brief moment when he expected his hand to come in contact with the smooth silk of Jordan’s skin. When he ate, his tongue instinctively sought the taste of Jordan. Whenever he picked up the phone, he expected to hear Jordan’s voice.
— Matthew Haldeman-Time, Off the Record
My life exists in an imagined reality.
— Mandy Patinkin
Imagination is the air of mind.
— Philip James Bailey
The imagination is precious. Don't lose it. Don't lose the child in you.
— Marilyn Manson
Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?""Sounds like a Japanese game show."Kat straightens her shoulders. "Okay, we're going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you're a science fiction writer."Okay: "World government... no cancer... hover-boards.""Go further. What's the good future after that?""Spaceships. Party on Mars.""Further.""Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.""Further.""I pause a moment, then realize: "I can't."Kat shakes her head. "It's really hard. And that's, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.
— Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.
— Anthony Powell
For him and his brother, he now knew, that music was real. Becuase all you had to do, really, was be willing to use your imagination. And listen.
— Holly Goldberg Sloan, I'll Be There
We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Tolkien Reader
Harness the imagination: Sometimes curbing her, sometimes giving her rein, for she is the whole of happiness. She sets to rights even the understanding. She sinks to tyranny, not satisfied with mere faith, but demanding works. Thus she becomes the mistress of life itself. She does so with pleasure or with pain, according to the nonsense presented. She makes people contented or discontented with themselves. By dangling before some nothing but the specter of their eternal suffering, she becomes the scourge of these fools. To others she shows nothing but fortune and romance, while merrily laughing. Of all this she is capable if not held in check by the wisest of wills.
— Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
Our age has become so mechanical that this has also affected our recreation. People have gotten used to sitting down and watching a movie, a ball game, a television set. It may be good once in a while, but it certainly is not good all the time. Our own faculties, our imagination, our memory, the ability to do things with our mind and our hands–they need to be exercised. If we become too passive, we get dissatisfied.
— Maria Augusta von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers
Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.
— Betty  Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I refuse to settle for what you call reality.
— Solange nicole
Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.
— Napoleon Hill
You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power.("Mind Over Murder")
— Cornell Woolrich, Angels of Darkness
For an instant Harry imagined... Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shut down and told him never to imagine that again.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
If you cannot build from nothing, then you'll have to destroy in order to create.
— Lionel Suggs
I am usually more impressed with people who are artful in shuffling a deck, than those who can masterfully play chess.
— Lionel Suggs
Copywriting is a design muse, it carves a beautiful masterpiece in an imaginative way.
— Sharen Song
Reality cannot breathe without imagination.
— Lionel Suggs
Darkness gives free rein to the mind's worst imaginings
— Jocelyn  Murray, The Gilded Mirror: Constantinople
Imagination is pure potentiality for creation. We shouldn't submit it to the hourly wages we subject our time at work.
— Carlos Roche, How to Turn Your Boss Into Your Employee
Lord Derfel, you do insult a man so very easily. What was it to be? My head in a pit dunged by slaves? What a paltry imagination you do have. Mine, I fear, sometimes seems excessive, even to me.
— Bernard Cornwell, Enemy of God
Public transit situates us so that we are given license to accept what's right in front of us, but will likely arouse our desire to compare our narrative to someone else's, to give ourselves permission to speculate upon a person's private space, or life, with no fear of recourse or punishment.
— Julie Wilson, Seen Reading
To understand pretending is to conquer all barriers of time and space.
— William Joyce, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King
To Vik Lovell who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs ...
— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The possibilities were endless. Battles would be fought. Wonders revealed. Many journeys. Many lands. Many joys. Many sorrows.But stories all...
— William Joyce, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King
A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles. Not because of any fear of drowned worms or wet stockings; I was by and large a grubby child, with a blissful disregard for filth of any kind.It was because I couldn't bring myself believe that that perfect smooth expanse was no more than I thin film of water over solid earth. I believed it was an opening into some fathomless space. Sometimes, seeing the tiny ripples caused by my approach, I thought the puddle impossibly deep, a bottomless sea in which the lazy coil of a tentacle and gleam of scale lay hidden, with the threat of huge bodies and sharp teeth adrift and silent in the far-down depths.And then, looking down into reflection, I would see my own round face and frizzled hair against a featureless blue sweep, and think instead that the puddle was the entrance to another sky. If I stepped in there, I would drop at once, and keep on falling, on and on, into blue space.The only time I would dare walk though a puddle was at twilight, when the evening stars came out. If I looked in the water and saw one lighted pinprick there, I could slash through unafraid--for if I should fall into the puddle and on into space, I could grab hold of the star as I passed, and be safe.Even now, when I see a puddle in my path, my mind half-halts--though my feet do not--then hurries on, with only the echo of the though left b
— Diana Gabaldon, Voyager
It is wonderful what tricks our dreams play us, and how conveniently we can imagine.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
Reality runs the risk of spoiling things, don't you think? The fantasy is often better. That's where the soul is fulfilled. Reality struggles to fulfil the soul, that's why we're often so unhappy. But fantasy is the world of the soul...
— James Lusarde, The Train of Arousal
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention,A kingdom for a stage, princes to actAnd monarchs to behold the swelling scene!Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fireCrouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,The flat unraised spirits that have daredOn this unworthy scaffold to bring forthSo great an object: can this cockpit holdThe vasty fields of France? or may we cramWithin this wooden O the very casquesThat did affright the air at Agincourt?O, pardon! since a crooked figure mayAttest in little place a million;And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,On your imaginary forces work.Suppose within the girdle of these wallsAre now confined two mighty monarchies,Whose high upreared and abutting frontsThe perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;Into a thousand parts divide on man,And make imaginary puissance;Think when we talk of horses, that you see themPrinting their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,Turning the accomplishment of many yearsInto an hour-glass: for the which supply,Admit me Chorus to this history;Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
— William Shakespeare, Henry V
I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.
— G.K. Chesterton
to understand pretending," Ombric was fond of saying, "is to conquer all barriers of time and space.
— William Joyce, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King
When people go away they vanish, turn to nothing, stop being. They live only in memories, haunting the imagination.
— Dezső Kosztolányi, Skylark
What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.
— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.
— Robert Henri, The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of Picture Making, the Study of Art
He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
— Washington Irving, Irving's Sketch Book
My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I’m sitting in front of a typewriter.
— Gary Reilly, Ticket To Hollywood
We are only constrained by the boundaries of our imagination
— David Moffett
I don't wear armor. I don't carry weapons. An emperor needs only his imagination.
— Lionel Suggs
If we have received a precious gift from God, it is our imagination. When we tap into our powers of imagination, we are bombs of possibilities.
— Hiroko Sakai
When people wish for harmony, I wish for chaos. I'd rather see imaginative means of self-destruction, than to see laziness and wasted potential.
— Lionel Suggs
Imagination can create lies that duals truths.
— Lionel Suggs
Intellectuals that approach me, only serve to feeding my intellectualism. Imaginists that approach me, only serve to enhancing my Imaginism. It's impossible to feed my I, for I am the Greatest 'I AM.
— Lionel Suggs
The root of all fear is imagination.
— Atsushi Ohkubo
Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else's fantasy isn't nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own.
— Nenia Campbell, Endgame
Christians . . . ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. Great painting is not "photographic": think of the Old Testament art commanded by God. There were blue pomegranates on the robes of the priest who went into the Holy of Holies. In nature there are no blue pomegranates. Christian artists do not need to be threatened by fantasy and imagination, for they have a basis for knowing the difference between them and the real world "out there." The Christian is the really free person--he is free to have imagination. This too is our heritage. The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.
— Francis A. Schaeffer, Art & the Bible
In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight.
— George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
In the past I had often tried to escape the grown-up world of sorrow through my imagination- dreaming that a handsome young lieutenant would ride to my rescue or that a great empresario would discover my musical talents and whisk me away. I had envisioned knights in shining armor and happily ever after scenes to escape from rules or boredom or pain; including a vision of my mother walking through our front door whole and well again. Now I knew that a lifetime of escape led to a life like Aunt Bertie's. My imagination was a gift, but I had to live in the real world. My eyes had been opened this summer to poverty and crime and abuse and I needed to use my imagination not to escape, but to help people like Irina and Katya, to make my own contribution as the women in the women's pavilion had done. I couldn't do it in the same way Jane Adams and my grandmother and Aunt Mat were, but I would find my own way and my own time.
— Lynn Austin, A Proper Pursuit
Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
— Victor Hugo
Employing your imagination is the first step to the fulfillment of any dream.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Because there is a word for perfection, people will always imagine that they know it.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
You’re afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.
— Lauren Oliver, The Spindlers
Neither your mother nor I have any imagination at all and we certainly didn't bring you up to have one
— John Boyne, The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket
To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.
— George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
When you are awake, your mind is limited. When you are dreaming, your mind is unlimited. Creation is a genius. The mind is a powerful aspect to reality, but no one can truly tell you what reality is, or how reality should be. You can only tell yourself. However, what if you can tap into your mental functions, and truly blur the line to the point, that whether you are awake or asleep, your mind makes the world real? What's the difference between bending the world in your dream, and bending the world in reality? The truth is, there is no difference, when you live in imagination.
— Lionel Suggs
Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind.
— George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us.
— Steven Redhead, The Solution
If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise.
— George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts
None of us need ever fear that we don't have an active imagination, because imagination is mostly a willingness to entertain a strange idea now and then.
— Bert Dodson, Keys to Drawing
He who doesn't fear his own imagination...is not worthy to envision.
— Lionel Suggs
When God broke his deal with me, I turned to the Devil. In the end, I wasn't happy. I realized that the imagination of a perfect being was more limited than that of the imperfect one. Color me unimpressed by the Actus Purus.
— Lionel Suggs
Information exists for a reason, as well as the Consciousness. The Ego and the Self are important concepts to one's character, to one's alpha and omega. However, how do you know what you know? How do you predict? How you reason? How do you justify? How do you interpret? What is the difference between logic and fantasy? When is the line blurred, and when is the blurred line clear? When you stop living, and dive into existence, you can uncover the world behind yourself; the divine ground. Truth itself wears a mask, but if you dive deep enough, you can wear the mask of Truth. So let me ask you, how well do you know your reality? How well do you know your imagination? Have you stood on the ground behind your reality? Have you seen the mask of Truth, and if so, have you worn its mask?
— Lionel Suggs
I didn't know the value of creation until I did it. Once I tasted imagination, I knew that I was trapped. I knew that I could never look back. At this point in my life, reality simply isn't enough for me. Dreams simply aren't enough for me. I need something more. I need to live in imagination. I need to become imagination.
— Lionel Suggs
Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.
— Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.
— John Lennon
The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect
—  the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination
That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone?
— Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.
— James     Baldwin
The world is only as small as we see it, my lady. Imagination knows no limits.
— C.W. Gortner, The Queen's Vow: A Novel of Isabella of Castile
The greatest gift that you were ever given was the gift of your imagination.
— Wayne W. Dyer, Wishes Fulfilled: Mastering the Art of Manifesting
It is my opinion that the isolated mind loses its purchase on reality all too easily and becomes prone to fantasy.
— Frank Tallis, A Death in Vienna
The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two alone that are born all the pains which make us truly unhappy.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education
Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
I never assume anything. I anticipate the possibilities and allow my imagination to create the future.
— Lionel Suggs
What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed.
— R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.
— Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things
I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit.
— Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Unfortunately, it has come to my attention that the modern world is sorely lacking in imagination. And grown-ups are the biggest culprits of all.
— Sarvenaz Tash, The Mapmaker and the Ghost
I've always been puzzled, and am still at this moment in a state of confusion, between the imaginative world and the real world. It is perfectly true to say that I have at some times in my life found that the imaginative world had pushed the real world right out of the way, and was literally more real.
— William Golding
Imagination doesn't always mean looking outside of the box, but taking a closed box and seeing a different world from within it.
— Lionel Suggs
All the mysteries of the universe are solved within the Imagination.
— K. Ford K.
Whatever thing the mind can imagine, the eyes can see, the hands will soon handle.
— Ogwo David Emenike
Look at a full vivid painting, and look at an empty picture. If you can immediately see an entire universe within the empty picture, and absolutely nothing in the vivid painting, clarity is your friend. If you immediately see a full vivid painting and an empty picture, and see them for what they are, slavery is your friend.
— Lionel Suggs
Reality is the place we need to live, but our imaginations harbor the greatest places to visit!
— Giuseppe Bianco
There was a time when our greed had not yet surpassed our imaginations as our greatest asset.
— Thomas Warfield
You aren’t allowed back until you’ve learned to willingly suspend disbelief.
— Rebecca Murphy, Plucking Cupid's Bow
Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
What a strange thing it is to wake up to a milk-white overcast June morning! The sun is hidden by a thick cotton blanket of clouds, and the air is vapor-filled and hazy with a concentration of blooming scent.The world is somnolent and cool, in a temporary reprieve from the normal heat and radiance.But the sensation of illusion is strong. Because the sun can break through the clouds at any moment . . .What a soft thoughtful time.In this illusory gloom, like a night-blooming flower, let your imagination bloom in a riot of color.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory--of this there is no doubt.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
You can purify your existence by feeling deep within yourself a beautiful rose or lotus, or any other flower that you like. A flower is all purity. Try to identify yourself with the consciousness of the flower or with the purity of the flower. Today it is imagination, but if you continue imagining for five days, or ten days, or a month or two, then you are bound to see and feel the flower within you. First you may feel it, then you are bound to see the existence of the flower, and then automatically the fragrance and the purity of the flower will enter into you to purify you.
— Sri Chinmoy, The Wings of Joy: Finding Your Path to Inner Peace
Just because I don't believe in YOUR God doesn't mean I don't believe in God. I just choose not to be bound by the limits of your imagination or those of your ancestors.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Just because it's imaginary, doesn't mean it's not real.
— T.L. Rese
Without the dreamers who write science fiction and other imaginary material we'd still be sitting in caves ... if we weren't already extinct.
— William C. Samples
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals
You're going to come across people in your life who will say all the right words at all the right times. But in the end, it's always their actions you should judge them by. It's actions, not words, that matter.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Rescue
Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart
— Eleanor Roosevelt
I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you're doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you're lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you're really lucky.
— Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
I enjoyed the meetings, too. It was like having friends.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
What was there to be gained by fighting the most evil wizard who has ever existed?" said Black, with a terrible fury in his face. "Only innocent lives, Peter!""You don't understand!" whined Pettigrew. "He would have killed me, Sirius!""THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED!" roared Black. "DIED RATHER THAN BETRAY YOUR FRIENDS, AS WE WOULD HAVE DONE FOR YOU!
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
We...we could be friends.'We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not.
— Neil Gaiman, Coraline
A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
— George Eliot
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friendship," said Christopher Robin, "is a very comforting thing to have.
— A.A. Milne
Never explain―your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
— Elbert Hubbard
I get by with a little help from my friends.
— John Lennon
Your Worst Enemy Could Be Your Best Friend && Your Best Friend Your Worst Enemy
— Bob Marley
Always sleep with one eye open. Never take anything for granted. Your best friends might just be your enemies.
— Sara Shepard, The Lying Game
I wanted to talk to someone. But who? It’s moments like this, when you need someone the most, that your world seems smallest.
— Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
— Colette
Ah, Harry, how often this happens, even between the best of friends! Each of us believes that what he has to say is much more important than anything the other might have to contribute!
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
For a friend with an understanding heart is worth no less than a brother
— Homer, The Odyssey
If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you'll never be and you need not waste time in trying.
— L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
We are your friends. It is the law of friendship that you tell us things you don’t want to tell us.
— J. Lynn, Wait for You
Do not be deceived: bad company corrupts good morals.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
All my friends seem to be smart arses. Don't ask me why. Like many things, it is what it is.
— Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger