Imagination: the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality. Fancy, vision, mind’s eye, dream, creative, conceive, inspiration, invention, ingenuity, unique, originality, innovation.
“Never feel sorry for raising dragon slayers in a time where there are real dragons.”
-Anonymous
“To see a world in a grain of sand
and heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour.”
-William Blake
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
“Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality.”
“I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then.”
“If you do not know where you want to go, it doesn’t matter which path you take.”
“You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret… All the best people are!”
“You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. If you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to run much faster.”
“But, I nearly forgot, you must close your eyes otherwise you won’t see anything.”
“We’re all mad here. You must be mad, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“A dream is not reality but who’s to say which is which?
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”
“Things are curiouser and curiouser.”
“I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours.”
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
“Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.”
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
“Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.”
“Now, isn’t imagination a precious thing? It peoples the earth with all manner of wonders.”
“Well, no doubt it’s a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed.”
“Man – a figment of God’s imagination.”
“Imagination labors best in distant fields.”
“No child should be permitted to grow up without exercise for imagination. It enriches life for him. It makes things wonderful and beautiful.”
Plato (428- 347 BC)
“Music gives wings to the mind and flight to the imagination.”
“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”
“Poets are to us in a manner the fathers and authors of the Wisdom.”
“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”
“The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.”
“A poet is a light and winged thing, and holy and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.”
“What a man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings with the divine madness of the Muses.”
“Art has no end but its own perfection.”
“At the touch by a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
“I know that I know nothing.”
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.”
“The hardest thing is to understand the question, after that finding the answer is quite simple.”
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
“Knowledge is limited, Imagination encircles the world.”
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
“The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
Emily Dickinson (1830- 1886)
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
“I dwell in possibility.”
“I hide myself within my flower,
That fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me –
Almost a loneliness
This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul.
Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.
Beauty is not caused. It is.
The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
Carl Sandburg (1878- 1967)
“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”
“Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.”
“Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.”
“The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.”
“Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.”
“Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.”
William Blake (1757- 1827)
“He who binds to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies: Lives in eternity’s sun rise.”
“I am in you and you in me, mutual in divine love.”
“Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.”
“What is now proved was once only imagined.”
“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”
“Do what you will, this world’s a fiction and is made up of contradiction.”
“The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.”
“Poetry fettered fetters the human race.”
Langston Hughes (1901- 1967)
“Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird, That cannot fly.”
“Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.”
“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.”
“Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people – the beauty within themselves.”
“Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.”
Sylvia Plath (1932- 1963)
“The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.”
“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”
“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.”
Walt Disney (1901-1966)
“Laughter is timeless. Imagination has no age. And dreams are forever.”
“If you can dream it, you can do it.”
“All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.”
“Believe in your dreams, no matter how impossible they seem.”
“That’s the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up.”
“Adults are only kids grown up”
“The magic is as wide as a smile and as narrow as a wink, loud as laughter and quiet as a tear, tall as a tale and deep as emotion. So strong, it can lift the spirit. So gentle, it can touch the heart. It is the magic that begins the happily ever after.”
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
“The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.”
“Everything you can imagine is real.”
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
“When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid.”
“To draw you must close your eyes and sing.”
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
“Nothing worth learning can ever be taught.”
“Be yourself; everyone else is taken.”
“It’s beauty that captures your attention. Personality which captures your heart.”
“Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
“Life is too short to be taken seriously.”
“Cats are put on earth to remind us that not everything has a purpose.”
“To look at a thing is very different from seeing it.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
“Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream.”
“When I waked, I cried to dream again.”
“Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.”
“O God, I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.”
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.”
“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.”
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
“True alchemy lies in this formula: Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse.”
“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn.”
“The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.”
“I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star … And I dance.”
Dancer Quotes
“Dance is the hidden language of the soul.”
-Martha Graham
“You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.”
-Martha Graham
“The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it’s with you all the time.”
– Alvin Ailey
“Live like you’ll die tomorrow, work like you don’t need the money, and dance like nobody’s watching.”
-Bob Fosse
“The universe lies before you on the floor, in the air, in the mysterious bodies of your dancers, in your mind. From this voyage no one returns poor or weary.”
-Agnes DeMille
“The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
Agnes DeMille
“We can hear the silent voice of the spiritual universe within our own hearts.”
-Ruth St. Denis
“The only excuse for dancing is grace and beauty of movement.”
-Anna Pavlova
“It is useless to dabble in beauty. One must be utterly devoted to beauty, with every nerve of the body.”
-Anna Pavlova
“You dance love, and you dance joy, and you dance dreams. And I know if I can make you smile by jumping over a couple of couches or running through a rainstorm, then I’ll be very glad to be a song and dance man.”
-Gene Kelly
“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”
-Twyler Tharp
“Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is inexplicable.”
-Margot Fonteyn
“You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”
-Isadora Duncan
“See the music, hear the dance.”
-George Balanchine
“What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.”
-Eleanor Powell
Haiku Poets
“The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one drop of dew on the grass.“
-Dogen.
“The monkey is reaching for the moon in the water.“
-Hakuin
“The sea darkening –
the wild duck’s call
is faintly white“
-Basho
“Winter solitude –
in a world of one color,
the sound of wind“
-Basho
“Before the chrysanthemum –
the scissors
hesitate a moment“
-Buson
“A field of mustard,
no whale in sight,
the sea darkening“
-Buson
“In the cherry blossom’s shade,
there is no such thing
as a stranger”
-Issa
Sources
AZquotes
Bookroom
Brainy Quotes
Goodreads
No Sweat Shakespeare
