Quotes about Imagination

Cecily: Oh, yes. Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man. He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows.

But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.

Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination.They are limited to their century. No glamour every transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good looking, and that I could paint.

The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

the poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at the harvest-time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield.

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.