Quotes
Quotes about Imagination
O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?
O, no! the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan's stithy.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now; your gambols, your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till we find it stopping a bung-hole?
Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.
The idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life,
Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit,
More moving-delicate and full of life
Into the eye and prospect of his soul.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
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 shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
But who can paint
Like Nature? Can imagination boast,
Amid its gay creation, hues like hers?
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
The Right Honorable gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.
But thou that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation.
The pilasters reaching down were adorned with a glistering substance (I know not what) under glass (as it seemed), resembling--a homely fancy, but I judged it to be sugar-candy; yet to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a glorified candy.
His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
That minister of ministers,
Imagination, gathers up
The undiscovered Universe,
Like jewels in a jasper cup.
Waste not the remnant of thy life in those imaginations touching other folk, whereby thou contributest not to the common weal.
Poetry of a surrealistic kind can, as a dream can, free the imagination from the trammels of daily cause and effect
If we take away plot, character, dialogue, even characters, we shall be left with something that is common to the most traditional and avant-garde novelist - a concern with interpreting, through the imagination, the flux of ordinary life; an attempt to understand, though not with the cold deliberation of the scientist, the nature of the external world and the mind that surveys it
Imagination is your true Apollo
Is not the imagination part of the soul?
The human imagination is capable of a terrible amount of evil
Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.
