IMAGINATION

Related Subjects: Dreams, Exaggeration, Fairies, Fancy, Fear, Ghost, Illusion, Invention, Originality, Senses, Tale, Vision

1. Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.—JOSEPH CONRAD, A Personal Record
   

2. That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.—JOSEPH CONRAD, Lord Jim
   

3. Imagination is as good as many voyages—and how much cheaper.—G. W. CURTIS, Prue and I
   

4. That minister of ministers,
   Imagination, gathers up
   The undiscovered Universe,
   Like jewels in a jasper cup.—JOHN DAVIDSON, There Is a Dish to Hold the Sea
   

5. To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.—ANATOLE FRANCE, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
   

6. As a rule, indeed, grown-up people are fairly correct on matters of fact; it is in the higher gift of imagination that they are so sadly to seek.—KENNETH GRAHAME, The Golden Age
   

7. Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.—SAMUEL JOHNSON
   

8. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth.—KEATS
   

9. Man consists of body, mind and imagination. His body is faulty, his mind untrustworthy, but his imagination has made him remarkable. In some centuries, his imagination has made life on this planet an intense practice of all the lovelier energies.—JOHN MASEFIELD, Shakespeare
   

10. Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.—SHAKESPEARE, King Lear

11. 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 form 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!—SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer-Night's Dream
    

12. Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.
    Robert: They come from your imagination.
    Joan: Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.—BERNARD SHAW, Saint Joan