c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I closed my eyelids, and imagination, taking up the thread of thought, shot its swift shuttle back across the ages, weaving a picture on their blackness so real and vivid in its details that I could almost for a moment think that I had triumphed o'er the Past, and that my spirit's eyes had pierced the mystery of Time.
— H. Rider Haggard
You must know where you're and see what's ahead of you, by doing that you'll be able to achieve your dreams and goals. This sort of journey is called the power of sight and the power of imagination. Without the capacity of imagination the future is doomed.
— Euginia Herlihy
Imaginative mind is the seed of every dream and every vision. It always starts from our minds before the manifestation.
— Euginia Herlihy
Writing opens the door to imagination.
— Joe Evener
Armenians have more imagination than Mohammedans.
— Kurban Said, Ali and Nino: A Love Story
One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh.
— Leo Tolstoy
Reading is the spark to imagination. Ignite yours and live forever free.
— Dan Sanders, The Circle of Six: Emily's Quest
Every Anglophile has his own private England which is, of course, unrecognizable to the English.
— Mark Dery, England My England: Anglophilia Explained
I cover the floor with a thin layer of imagination so that i’ll always land softly.
— Anna Jae
There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another's) situation.
— Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest
I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life, and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.
— Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt
To dream of afar, to chase a star, to believe in Captain Hook. To dance with bears and have no cares, this is the magic of a book.
— H.L.  Stephens, The Case of Jack the Nipper
I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My feet stepped like theirs over the floorboards and the flagstones, but my heart was far away, even if it beat close by, false master of an estranged and exiled body.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Change starts with imagination
— Alex Munoz
I don't just write books. I climb inside and live there.
— Aurora Whittet
Drop down all those imaginations and feelings that "Success is built on Success". A HERO can be built from ZERO. Begin from where you stand with what you have!
— Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes
He ached for creation. For life to somehow rise from the drawings in his sketching book. For his own energy, his own impressions to swirl and spin on a canvas. For a dream city he had tacked above his bed.
— C.S. Richardson, The Emperor of Paris
When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they’re standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.
— Meg Rosoff
How convinced are you that man was created in the image of God when you can't see the image of God?
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Classic Quotations From The Otherworlds
Growing up I often wondered how the world would be today if, since the beginning of human life, every person acted as I did.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
We are but one of many ideas against a greater imagination.
— James C. Emlund
I am glad to see that you have enough imagination not to be altogether a fool... Yes, it is want of imagination that makes people fools; they won't believe what they can't understand.
— H. Rider Haggard, Hunter Quatermain's Story: The Uncollected Adventures of Allan Quatermain
Keep a clear picture of your goals in mind.The power of imagination is unlimited.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Everything you can imagine,is real.
— Sujayendra
I didn’t think you were real for a long time,” I confess. “I thought you were someone I’d dreamed up.”“A dream worth reliving every night for ten years?” he asks, chuckling and slowly loosening his hold.“For eternity,” I whisper, winding my arms around his neck to keep him close.“Good.” He leans down and brushes his lips against mine. “That is exactly how long I plan on keeping you.
— Erica Cameron, Sing Sweet Nightingale
when you ARE imagining you might as well imagine something worth while
— L.M. Montgomery, The Anne Stories (Anne of Green Gables, #1-3, 5, 7-8)
The best way to get over your fear of meeting new people is to imagine them naked. Unless you’re networking at a nudist camp, then you may have to get more creative.
— Ryan Lilly, #Networking is people looking for people looking for people
Still, though, I can't be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that it's too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it my imagination has invented. I feel as if I've wandered into a labyrinth. Has that ever happened to you?
— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
To reach only for that which pleasantly enchants you is the least of imagination, if even imagination at all, by the obvious reality of remaining within your means. The greater of imagination is parallel to risk. It extends beyond your comfort zone or haven, or sense of beauty, or what you personally believe suits you in exploration of what may not.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I believe in the power of imagination. I believe in the unexplained possibilities of the spirit. And I believe that the heart, like any other muscle, grows stiff if it is not exercised regularly.I believe.
— Eve Zibart, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World for Grown-Ups
The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
Nothing is unreal as long as you can imagine like a crow
— Munia Khan
Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. Man alone can direct his success mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.
— Maxwell Maltz
I see a cathedral, for instance, one that’s stood for centuries and I marvel and I wonder... How many people passed through the doors? What did they pray for? How many wars did they wish to see ended? How many christenings, weddings, and funerals? Same thing with a record, I guess. Who bought it? Did they ever make love while it was playing? How many times did they read the notes in the cover? Did a song on the album change their life? I suppose it's odd to think about things like that.
— Benjamin R.  Smith, Atlas
Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities".
— Joan Lindsay, The Secret of Hanging Rock
If you had come to me a hundred years ago, do you think I should have dreamed of the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it! I use it every day, I transact half my correspondence by means of it, but I don’t understand it. Think of that little stretched disk of iron at the end of a wire repeating in your ear not only sounds, but words—not only words, but all the most delicate and elusive inflections and nuances of tone which separate one human voice from another!
— William Crookes
Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.
— Dionne Brand, What We All Long For
Step inside your favorite storybook and become lost in a journey only your imagination can envision.
— K. Lamb
Any chemist reading this book can see, in some detail, how I have spent most of my mature life. They can become familiar with the quality of my mind and imagination. They can make judgements about my research abilities. They can tell how well I have documented my claims of experimental results. Any scientist can redo my experiments to see if they still work—and this has happened! I know of no other field in which contributions to world culture are so clearly on exhibit, so cumulative, and so subject to verification.
— Donald J. Cram, From Design to Discovery
If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast—I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people—perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven—but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination.
— Jorge Luis Borges
And when the Duke of Alva ordered three hundred Citizens to be put to Death together at Antwerp, a Lady who saw the Sight was presently afterwards deliver'd of a Child without a Head. So lives the Power of Imagination even in this Rationall Age.
— Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
If it is indeed the business of imagination to make politics distrust itself - reminding it that its principles are not literal facts but constructs of imagination - it is also its business to encourage politics to remake itself by remaking its images of the good life.
— Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post-Modern
Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.
— Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post-Modern
There are no shadows in the Underdark. There is no room for imagination in the Underdark. It is a place for alertness, but not aliveness, a place with no room for hopes and dreams.
— R.A. Salvatore, Starless Night
Imagination just wasn't up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how to dampen or augment what it already knew. - Juliette, Pg. 139
— Hugh Howey
A book is a magical thing that lets you travel to far-away places without ever leaving your chair.
— Katrina Mayer
The road to success is longer than you'd like, but shorter than you imagine.
— Tim Fargo
I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first language, and I had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick og everything. In my dreams I have used that language to heal the sick and to fly; once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed-and-breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, 'Be whole.' and they would become whole, not be broken people , not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I could spend all day lost in someone else's imagination. I love reading.
— Joanna Bolouri, The List
The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.
— Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
Everyday, Jay would sit under a giant elm tree and imagine the adventures his life might bring.
— Ilchi Lee, Bird of the Soul
Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.
— Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven
Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
— Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn
I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination.
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Before the Wright brothers flew, flying was fantasy. Before the civil rights movement, people getting along together and the races being equal was a fantasy. Things change because we imagine a different world, a world that is not. And I think that imagination is one of the most important and defining aspects of human existence: our ability to imagine a world that is not.
— Brandon Sanderson
De-calcify the pineal gland with the detergent of imagination
— Dean Cavanagh
You don't need to sit on a throne before you have the chance to dream
—  you don't have to feel fat meat in-between your molars to become a strategic dreamer. You can be a dreamer once you can think
He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why he traveled it, he did not know, though all seemed simple and natural, as is the way in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from troubling and the judgment is at rest.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Death of Halpin Frayser
To write is to feel the dance of your soul swirling in a dream that drips imagination onto paper.
— DiAnn Mills, The Dance of Character and Plot
A Dream is a seed.Vision plants it.Imagination nurtures growth.Opportunities create blooms.Reflection becomes Reality!
— Donna McGoff
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
Artistry is the dance of color & form, whether visual, musical, or sparked in the imagination by the written word.
— Cathryn Louis, Sparks
We live vicariously through stories, because our own lives provide so few opportunities for high-stakes adventure and noble sacrifice.
— Sarah Cross, Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader
Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
— George Eliot
1 Minute Wisdom: Rethink Your Success Mindset because...Whatever you create in your imagination and dreams, will require the right mindset to manifest in reality.
— Tony Dovale
Life is full of disparate details arbitrarily joined together by dreams, pain and yearning. I do not long for sense, but I call for emotion and imagination amidst this chaos.
— Juhani Peltonen
Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.
— Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always the key to her deepest distress. She must watch and guide, but he must lead, and he will always appear to be giving far more of his real attention to his comrades than he is giving to her. But that noisy, outward openness of men with each other enables them to deal with the silence and secrecy of women, that silence and secrecy which contains the truth of a man, and releases it. I suppose that the root of the resentment—a resentment which hides a bottomless terror—has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man’s imagination makes of her—literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman’s.—Anyway, in this fucked up time and place, the whole thing becomes ridiculous when you realize that women are supposed to be more imaginative than men. This is an idea dreamed up by men, and it proves exactly the contrary. The truth is that dealing with the reality of men leaves a woman very little time, or need, for imagination. And you can get very fucked up, here, once you take seriously the notion that a man who is not afraid to trust his imagination (which is all that men have ever trusted) if effeminate. It says a lot about this country, because, of course, if all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination. Or women, for that matter: or men.
— James     Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
When imagination fails, compassion and humaneness dwindle and atrophy along with it. Unleavened by imagination, the variety and richness of life turn into flat abstractions; people become objects to be manipulated -- with the social consequences we know all too well.
— Lloyd Alexander
Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.
— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
We restore order through the imagination. We restore hope over and over and over again ... .
— Walt Disney Company, Saving Mr Banks the Official Multi Touch Book
I have lain long here in your mind, longer than any nightmare has before me. I have sunk my roots into your worst imaginings and feasted on your memories. I know you, child.
— J. Aleksandr Wootton, The Eighth Square
Imaginary diseases are the hardest to cure.
— Marty Rubin
It was a strange trek — the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused.
— David Brin, Brightness Reef
Where faith commences, science ends. Both these arts of the human mind must be strictly kept apart from each other. Faith has its origin in the poetic imagination; knowledge, on the other hand, originates in the reasoning intelligence of man. Science has to pluck the blessed fruits from the tree of knowledge, unconcerned whether these conquests trench upon the poetical imaginings of faith or not.
— Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation V1: Or the Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes
Christmas is best pondered, not with logic, but with imagination.
— Max Lucado
I've always let my imagination run free, but now I try to rein it in. Things never turn out the way I imagine, so I am letting them rest. Instead, I am holding just what is in my hand.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
Every invention began as an imagination.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
Osborn was a founding partner of the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO), but it was as an author that he really made his mark, beginning with the day in 1938 that a magazine editor invited him to lunch and asked what his hobby was. “Imagination,” replied Osborn.
— Susan Cain
Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.
— Sara Sheridan
A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities.
— Sara Sheridan
I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job.
— Sara Sheridan
I possess a gorgeous world.I created it and painted it like a fiveyears old, where the sky is wovenwith golden threads and the sun ispearl white.But alas! You can't observe it as theyare positioned inside my mind myimaginations...-Rohan Nath
— Rohan Nath
Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.
— Sara Sheridan
I possess a gorgeous world.I created it and painted it like a fiveyears old, where the sky is wovenwith golden threads and the sun ispearl white.But alas! You can't observe it as theyare positioned inside my mind myimaginations...
— Rohan Nath
Children arrive animists. They learn about life, themselves, and empathy by imagining the liveliness of everything they come into contact with.
— S. Kelley Harrell, Teen Spirit Guide to Modern Shamanism
But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo's anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in.
— John Green, Paper Towns
There are places which exist in this world beyond the reach of imagination.
— Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness
What you couldn't see and only imagined was always scarier than what was real.
— Ilsa J. Bick, Monsters
The imagination is always the best torturer.
— Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One
Of course! the path to heavendoesn't lie down in flat miles.It's in the imaginationwith which you perceive this world,and the gestureswith which you honor it.-from The Swan
— Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1
The world, I think, will wait a long time for Nikola Tesla's equal in achievement and imagination.
— Edwin Howard Armstrong
Remember when we didn't know that colours can mix and form other colours. When we were not introduced to strokes that brushes can form, when light and dark were not necessary for the picture to be completed, and when it was a matter of lines that were not suppose to be connected. When feelings crashed on a white heart unintentionally and when our soul was not held in captive. Remember?
— Mona Adnan
An imagination submitted to the movement of the Holy Spirit is a powerful tool in the hands of God to write testaments of His glory.
— Alisa Hope Wagner, Eve of Awakening
Writing a story is like ruling the world. Except it's even better. How many rulers out there that you know can tell people what they say?
— VanillaCreamPie8888
Let your imagination spread, until you are satisfied, like I am.
— Chres May
He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Your imagination is critical to discovering your dream.
— Bil Cornelius, Today Is the Day: Find and Embrace Your God-Given Dreams
In German one of the terms for imagination is the compound word Einbildungskraft: literally, the "power ( Kraft)" of "forming ( Bildung)" into "one (Ein)." Here I want us to reflect about faith as a kind of imagination. Faith forms a way of seeing our everyday life in relation to holistic images of what we may call the ultimate environment. Human action always involves responses and initiatives. We shape our action ( our responses and initiatives) in accordance with what we see to be going on. We seek to fit our actions into, or oppose them to , larger patterns of action and meaning. Faith, in its binding us to centers of value and power and in its triadic joining of us into communities of shared trusts and loyalties, gives forms and content to our imaging of an ultimate environment.
— James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning
Our room swallowed light whole. Even in summer when sunlight glared through the windows, it was somehow dim inside. Now it was only Easter morning, and the muted sky of early spring offered scant relief to our tenebrous room. On our side of the house a gnarled and ancient oak tree spread its reach across the back facade of the house as if to shade and protect us. One of the massive branches of its principal fork reached invitingly right up to our window to offer to take us wherever we wanted to go. This great limb, with circumference grander than both of us together, was our stairway to heaven and our secret exit to the ground; it was our biplane in the Great War of our imaginations and a magic carpet to Araby; it was our lookout post and the clubhouse of our most secret fraternal order; it was our secret passageway through the imaginary castle we made of our house. It was our escape from the darkness into the light.
— Mason West
Imagination must constantly run on a new track or it becomes lifeless. A living imagination is essential to prayer.
— Calvin Miller, The Table of Inwardness
God created us in His image, and He gave us an imagination with His imprint to create things for His glory!
— Alisa Hope Wagner, Eve of Awakening
Oh, and you must not forget the Kris Kringle. The child must believe in him until she reaches the age of six."" I KNOW there is not Santa Claus.""Yet you must teach the child that these things are so.""Why? When I, myself, do not believe?""Because...the child must have a valuable things which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which [to] live things that never were. It is necessary that she BELIEVE. She must start out 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
- You may always talk to me, honey... - Started suddenly bright white moon. - The stars are too young to give you a wise advice, yet.
— Galina Nelson, Angelina and The Kingdom of Grace
Everyone that steps on to the ladder of success must have hope. Without it, no one is able to reach the top.
— Ellen J. Barrier
I'm still trying to defog the bathroom mirror to see the dream for what it clearly is.
— From A Wildflower
They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
You don’t read to exercise the mind but to take voyages
— John Geddes
Even when I worked in that world, I still wanted love so strong that the man would have no interest in another woman. Maybe you will always be incapable of giving that kind of love. You tell me I want too much. And maybe I do. But like you and your imagination, I can't help but be that way.
— Amy Tan, The Valley of Amazement
Half asleep and half awake, I became lost in a deep span of my version of a perfect world. A place I wanted so desperately to reach, but would never find except from within the catacombs of my mind.A place where the sun rose in the west and set in the east, where the mountains bowed to the wind like trees, and the rain sprinkled up from the ground below and onto the clouds above. A place where no one hurt or lost, or felt any tinge of desperation. A place where heartbeats were the only words needed, and music floated on the wind like dust.A place where no place was home. Where a single person could be the only sustenance needed to survive. A place where there were no yesterdays or todays, only tomorrows. A place for me to find solace, an escape from the real world I was forced to live in.
— Katlyn Charlesworth, The Tomorrows
You can create you different world with your loving one in talks only. This doesn't need to be there but with the heart and true care you can enjoy everything in the world
— Pawan Mehra
In Ruth's view, they looked 'like a couple' because they seemed to possess some terrible secret between them - they appeared stricken with remorse when they saw her. Only a novelist could ever imagine such nonsense. (In part, it was because of her perverse ability to imagine anything that in this instance Ruth failed to imagine the obvious)
— John Irving, A Widow for One Year
Now more than ever the world needs your brilliance, your voice, your unique imagination, and your particular genius.
— Gloria Burgess, Dare to Wear Your Soul on the Outside: Live Your Legacy Now
People will say,"there's heaven and hell", and they take it so serious that they look so sorrowful with penitence. I would rather ask them to show me the route that leads to heaven or hell.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Without imagination, writing is a stack of lumber, a sack of nails, and a locked tool shed.
— Michael J. Kannengieser, The Daddy Rock
Don’t let your idea of God be limited to the imagination of others. Don’t let them define your God and don’t let them tell you how to express your faith.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
We all live like cockroaches in the crevices of our imagination.
— Raymond Federman
Books allow one to jump into another person's imagination while also exploring their own!
— Jen Selinsky
Let Your Imagination Take Flight
— Jordan Bernal, The Keepers of Eire
This was not what we wanted to hear that morning. Adventures inspire, tall tales excite, and fantasies stir the imagination, but sad stories seldom ever buoy the spirit. We all paused to take in the sad news.
— J.W. Lord
The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.
— Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self
Subcreation is not just a desire, but a need and a right; it renews our vision and gives us new perspective and insight into ontological questions that might otherwise escape our notice within the default assumptions we make about reality.
— Mark J.P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good t
— Neil Gaiman
Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
And habits are hell's own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative , of imagination. They're the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.
— Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings
I wish my brain had an off switch. Maybe that way I could get some sleep.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
The only seed that needs regular watering is our imagination.
— Diriye Osman, Fairytales for Lost Children
Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands.
— Sarah Dunant, Blood & Beauty: The Borgias
In those sticky summer nights in South London our windows stay open and our tiny apartment becomes our secret garden. The magic of the secret garden is that it exists in our imagination. There are no limits, no borderlines. The secret garden leads to the marigolds of Mogadishu and the magnolias of Kingston and when the heat turns us sticky and sweet and unwilling to be claimed by defeat we own the night. We own our bodies. We own our lives.
— Diriye Osman, Fairytales for Lost Children
But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand - If it is to be done, it must be by studying Humboldt.
— Charles Darwin
What is the use of having an imagination if you can't make it work for you?
— Carolyn Wells, Patty's Summer Days
He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.("Pollock And The Porrah Man")
— H.G. Wells, Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
Anything you can think of, anything you can imagine- is real.. somewhere. We dream of such things, here on earth, never realizing in our dream-state our minds are peering into other worlds.
— Anya Allyn, Paper Dolls
Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.
— José Ortega y Gasset
A man of character can have what a man of intellect can imagine.
— Raheel Farooq
When I am alone, I drink my tea with pinkie raised, like a kid playing "tea party." At times, a fancy British accent is involved. Dahling!
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
I want everyday magic.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Nevertheless, scientific method is not the same as the scientific spirit. The scientific spirit does not rest content with applying that which is already known, but is a restless spirit, ever pressing forward towards the regions of the unknown, and endeavouring to lay under contribution for the special purpose in hand the knowledge acquired in all portions of the wide field of exact science. Lastly, it acts as a check, as well as a stimulus, sifting the value of the evidence, and rejecting that which is worthless, and restraining too eager flights of the imagination and too hasty conclusions.
— Archibald E. Garrod
Reading books would be boring if you lack imagination...
— Himmilicious
Could be I've finally gone crazy, but men crazier than me have done greater things than I've ever dreamed, so we'll see where it takes me." ~ Tom Parker, Imagination Stone
— Drew Bankston
I watched plays with the kind of voracity with which small children read books; with the same visceral passion, the same complete trust in the imagination which is so difficult to sustain through the course of one's whole life.
— Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox's Birthday: A Novel
When you spend time worrying, you’re simply using your imagination to create things you don’t want.
— Shannon L. Alder
I believe that we have the ability to change our lives using our imaginations. Imagination is a muscle—the more you use it, the stronger it gets.
— Rodman Philbrick, The Last Book in the Universe
Every time you think of escaping mentally or physically, grab the book that lies inches away from your heart.
— Muna Adnan Naqi
Real sex is as much about reciprocity as it is exploration and if you need a reason to resent a man later on, just consider the guy who doesn’t believe in cunnilingus...
— Roberto Hogue, Real Secrets of Sex: A Women's Guide on How to Be Good in Bed
Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing.
— Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.
— Pearl S. Buck, The Eternal Wonder
One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott’s heroes still may strut, Dickens’s delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray’s worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.
— Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science
If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an ‘oomph,’ this theory could explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is a good theory, is it not? No. It is nowhere near as good as the proposition that the planets move around the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly inversely as the square of the distance from the center. The second theory is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the result of chance. It is so definite that the barest error in the movement can show that it is wrong; but the planets could wobble all over the place, and, according to the first theory, you could say, ‘Well, that is the funny behavior of the ‘oomph.
— Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
Unicorns and rainbows exist because we want them to.
— Truth Devour, Wantin
Life can be just black and white, but with imagination, life is a kaleidoscope of exhilarating colors and breathtaking adventures.
— Wes Adamson
Creativity is as much about order against freedom
—  control versus rebellion
Transcendental artists are messengers. Their symbolic vocabulary originates from the infinite wisdom of higher spheres, in a non-referential time/space continuum... the way of the shaman. The presence of glyphs speaks a universal language of the soulthat transcends words. If one considers the notion of parallel realities and the plurality of dimensional realms, the premise of art as "consciousness-provoking vessel" can be viewed as an organic and natural occurrence.
— ELLE NICOLAI
If your imaginary friends are at all like mine, they’re better off dead.
— Susan Spann
Art is a consciousness-provoking vessel.
— ELLE NICOLAI
The best tool in a writer's arsenal is a reader's imagination.
— Tim Campbell
If you blink enough and relax a whole new world is opened to you.
— Kris Harte
Let the letters clash forming an invisible meaning of a sunny night, freezing chimney, and silent screams. When words betray you, hold on to your imagination.
— Mona Naqi
It is inconceivable that any form of intelligence would waste so much time and effort to make such an inferior piece of life—with all the 'ills that flesh is heir to,' and with all the misery and suffering that is so essential a part of living.If man is a 'fallen angel,' by the commission of a 'sin,' then disease and sorrow are part of God's inscrutable plan as a penalty imposed upon him for his 'disobedience,' and man's entire life is devoted to the expiation of that sin so as to soften the indictment before the 'Throne of God.'Man's atonement consists in making himself as miserable as possible by praying, fasting, masochism, flagellations and other forms of torture. This sadistic delusion causes him to insist that others—under pain of punishment—be as miserable as himself, for fear that if others fail to do as he does, it will provoke the wrath of his tyrant God to a more severe chastisement.The inevitable result is that Man devotes his life, not to the essentials of living and the making of a happy home, but to the building of temples and churches where he can 'lift his voice to God' in a frenzy of fanaticism, and eventually he becomes a victim of hysteria.His time and energy are wasted to cleanse his 'soul,' which he does not possess, and to save himself from a future punishment in hell which exists only in his imagination.
— Joseph Lewis, An Atheist Manifesto
Right now I can't even control my own imagination as it grips my hair and drags me into the dark
— Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me
Paranoia. The more you think of an imaginary problem, the more you feel as though it’s real –
— Simona Panova, Nightmarish Sacrifice
Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds.
— Rebecca Solnit
But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
— Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978
Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
— W.B. Yeats
Life is a great big beautiful three-ring circus. There are those on the floor making their lives among the heads of lions and hoops of fire, and those in the stands, complacent and wowed, their mouths stuffed with popcorn. I know less now than ever about life, but I do know its size. Life is enormous. Much grander than what we’ve taken for ourselves, so far. When the show is over and the tent is packed, the elephants, lions and dancing poodles are caged and mounted on trucks to caravan to the next town. The clown’s makeup has worn, and his bright, red smile has been washed down a sink. All that is left is another performance, another tent and set of lights. We rest in the knowledge: the show must go on. Somewhere, behind our stage curtain, a still, small voice asks why we haven’t yet taken up juggling. My seminars were like this. Only, instead of flipping shiny, black bowling balls or roaring chainsaws through the air, I juggled concepts. The world is intrinsically tied together. All things march through time at different intervals but move ahead in one fashion or another. Though we may never understand it, we are all part of something much larger than ourselves—something anchoring us to the spot we have mentally chosen. We sniff out the rules, through spiritual quests and the sciences. And with every new discovery, we grow more confused. Our inability to connect what seems illogical to unite and to defy logic in our understanding keeps us from enlightenment. The artists and insane tiptoe around such insights, but lack the compassion to hand-feed these concepts to a blind world. The interconnectedness of all things is not simply a pet phrase. It is a big “T” truth that the wise spend their lives attempting to grasp.
— Christopher Hawke, Unnatural Truth
Use the imagination to picture only what is good, what is beautiful, what is beneficial, what is ideal, and what you wish to realize. Mentally see yourself receiving what you deeply desire to receive. What you imagine, you will think, and what you think, you will become. Therefore, if you imagine only those things that are in harmony with what you wish to obtain or achieve, all your thinking will soon tend to produce what you want to attain or achieve.
— Christian D. Larson
I love dipping into dreams and sinuously sinking into sleep. It's the freest place to be. The possibilities are limitless and my imagination becomes a weightless wonder.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Masturbation = Imagination + Activity. Worry = Imagination + Negativity.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It’s no secret that we all live within a damning illusion called denial. We are doomed by our own far-reaching imaginations and beliefs that extend into a glorified version of eternity. How are we to live sanely on the earth, with our heads in the clouds, when we are so far from being giants? How are we to claim higher ideals, when God is absent from the conversations in our minds? There can be no going back, once we’ve believed in perfection. We are slain by the stories we were taught as children, stories about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and a God who cares. We pass these heirlooms to our children with the same fervor with which they were delivered, never allowing ourselves to doubt their authenticity or value. I wondered what the view held outside the proverbial slaughterhouse. For a spiritually awakened person, a good God seems the only reasonable answer. If there’s no eternal good, then what would be the use of life? Man lays the tracks of good and evil before the train of his evolution, moving onward into places he barely understands
— Christopher Hawke
You will get little or nothing from the printed page if you bring it nothing but your eye.
— Walter B. Pitkin, Art of Rapid Reading
There it is,” he’d say reverentially. “The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. [..] Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.
— Marisha Pessl
Our hearts and imaginations need to dance and play if we are to live awake
— Jaeda DeWalt
Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.
— Lord Dunsany
Your imagination is a gift, unwrap it.
— Jaeda DeWalt
Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Changing Planes
Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for the pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candlelight. He mutters something, something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move. A poplar. A man with plumes. A swimming figure. And he would not be so lucky, he thinks, to speak to the young sapper again.	He stays awake in any case this night, to see if the figure moves towards him. Ignoring the tablet that brings painlessness, he will remain awake till the light dies out and the smell of candle smoke drifts into his room and into the girl's room farther down the hall. If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this.	His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room. [298]
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
A slice of bread eaten is a million times more nourishing than a loaf of bread imagined.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To masturbate is to imagine: physically.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
...And yet a knowledgeis here that tenses the throatas for song: the inheritanceof the ones, alive or oncealive, who stand behindthe ones I have imagined,who took into their mindsthe troubles of this place,blights of love and race,but saw a good fate hereand willingly paid its cost,kept it the best they could,thought of its good,and mourned the good they lost.(From the ending of Where in Clearing, p179)
— Wendell Berry, The Collected Poems, 1957-1982
Where beams of imagination play,The memory's soft figures melt away.
— Alexander Pope
Tell someone a story, and you capture their imagination. Make someone laugh, and you capture their friendship. Bring a tear to their eye with poignant grace, and you capture their heart. But never, never attempt to capture someone’s spirit. That is theirs, and theirs alone.
— Pen
Kellyanne opened the car door and crawled into my bedroom. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: "Ashmol, Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead." That's how she said it.
— Ben Rice, Pobby and Dingan
I still say Kellyanne could do with some real-live mates," went on my dad, as if he was talking to someone inside his beer.Mum had stomped off into the kitchen. "Maybe they are real!" she shouted back at him after rattling a few plates together. "Ever thought about that, ye of little bloody imagination?
— Ben Rice, Pobby and Dingan