The lunatic, the love, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact ...
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i @7
The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them. ibid. V i 215
He waxes desperate with imagination. William Shakespeare, Hamlet I iv 87, Horatio to Marcellus
It is a damned ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul. ibid. III i 78-79, Hamlet
Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings;
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not. William Shakespeare, Macbeth I iii 137
You can’t do it unless you can imagine it. George Lucas
Imagination rules the world. Napoleon Bonaparte
Imagination creates reality. Richard Wagner
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all. Anatole France
Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public. Epictetus
Our imagination flies – we are its shadow on the earth. Vladimir Nabokov
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. J G Ballard
My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day. John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Imagination means nothing without doing. Charles Chaplin
Hate is a lack of imagination. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. J K Rowling
All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems! Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King, 1959
How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun’s rays, then sinking back to rest in the night. The whole world is in motion to the center. So also sounds. We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of turbulent streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect wings, enables us to hear, all around the world, the vibration of every needle, the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in circulation like particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full of avalanche debris – we hear them boom again, and we read the past sounds from present conditions. Again we hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite. John Muir, The National Parks and Forest Reservations, Sierra Club Bulletin 1:7 January 1896
A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderlan
I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds. Quentin Crisp
The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream. Oscar Wilde