Quotes about Imagination

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

our Lord satisfied the stomach before satisfying the eye, but the imagination acts in the reverse fashion

I think you had better learn to control that imagination of yours,Anne, if you can't distinguish between what is real and what isnt.

Oh, what I know about myself isn't really worth telling, said Anne eagerly. If you'll only let me tell you what I imagine about myself you'll think it ever so much more interesting.

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be--to me in all events--a terrible thing without books.

Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.

Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.

Imagine there's no heaven... it's easy if you try.

Real science can be far stranger than science fiction and much more satisfying.

But without wisdom, imagination is like a cruel taskmaster.