Quotes about Illusion
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Quotes about Illusion

Quotes about Imagination


Quotes about Illusion

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Quotes about Imitation

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212 art quotes about Imagination found | Share this page of quotes about Imagination on Facebook

When I'm ready to make a photograph... I quite obviously see in my mind's eye something that is not literally there... I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without. (Ansel Adams)

Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. (Franklin P. Adams)

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed. (Joseph Addison)

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap. (Stella Adler)

I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. (Brian Aldiss)

Absent imagination and artistic vision, we are blind to the wonders of creation. (David Allio)

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings. (Henri-Frederic Amiel)

Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine. (Louis Aragon)

Always remember, 'If you cannot imagine it you cannot achieve it.' (Kathleen Arnason)

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination. (Frank Auerbach)

...illusion throughout is illusion. There is no end to it, just as there is no end to imagination. (Meher Baba)

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly. (Lauren Bacall)

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there. (Richard Bach)

Man is an imagining being. (Gaston Bachelard)

Imagination is the air of mind. (Philip James Bailey)

Convention and restriction release inhibition and provoke the imagination. (Darby Bannard)

I get the facts, I study them patiently, I apply imagination. (Bernard Baruch)

The imagination is a powerful tool. An artist can use it to show others the world as he sees it and to bring others into his dream of what the world could be. (David R. Becker)

-Henderson the Rain King, 1959
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)

Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match. (Ingrid Bengis)

As children, our imaginations are vibrant, and our hearts are open... Everything amazes us, and we think anything is possible. We continuously experience life with a sense of newness and unbridled curiosity. (Yehuda Berg)

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open. (John Berger)

imagination, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership. (Ambrose Bierce)

What renders a picture 'life' are the fantasies it evokes - mine, the viewer's and the model's. (Simone Bingemer)

What is now proved was once only imagined. (William Blake)

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow. (William Blake)

Imagination rules the world. (Napoleon Bonaparte)

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life. (Daniel J. Boorstin)

Nothing was as I had imagined it... my thoughts of the island had circled around three immobile mental images, assembled during the reading of a brochure and an airline timetable. (Alain de Botton)

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, 'Just watch!' (Bill Bradley)

The man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot. (Andre Breton)

To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery - even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness - is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be. (Andre Breton)

The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. (Jacob Bronowski)

To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man. (Jacob Bronowski)

The book took me over the walls of the safe, sheltered enclave of my own existence into unmapped territory of the imagination. (Loranne Brown)

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it. (Art Buchwald)

The imagination acquires by custom a certain involuntary, unconscious power of observation and comparison, correcting its own mistakes, and arriving at precision of judgment, just as the outward eye is disciplined to compare, adjust, estimate, measure, the objects reflected on the back of its retina. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)

Your imagination is an extremely powerful tool. (Rhonda Byrne)

The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it. (Alexander Calder)

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding. (Thomas Carlyle)

Imagination means nothing without doing. (Charlie Chaplin)

People can die of mere imagination. (Geoffrey Chaucer)

The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. (G. K. Chesterton)

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. (G. K. Chesterton)

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Imagination is not antagonistic to knowledge. On the contrary, the highest imagination is that which can assimilate all kinds of knowledge and make use of it as a vantage ground from which to soar to higher things. (John Collier)

The source and center of all man's creative power... is his power of making images, or the power of imagination. (Robert Collier)

Imagination, industry, and intelligence... are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without doubt, imagination. (Kitty O'Neill Collins)

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)

When being praised for a painting he had just finished, the artist, James Fitzgerald said, 'You should have seen it in my mind.' (Guy Corriero)

Live out of your imagination, not your history. (Stephen R. Covey)

Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination. (Benedetto Croce)

You have a first image. You just know that it is always going to be there. You don't question that. (Alfonso Cuaron)

Inspiration comes from the imagination. (Ginia A. Davis)

Don't play what's there, play what's not there. (Miles Davis)

I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. (Richard Dawkins)

What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me. (Edgar Degas)

A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy. (Edgar Degas)

What you can imagine depends on what you know. (Daniel Dennett)

Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details. (Daniel Dennett)

If you get an image try to destroy it. (Richard Diebenkorn)

We invent the past and remember the future. (Isak Dinesen)

Imaginary evils are incurable. (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. (Albert Einstein)

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there. (Richard Feynman)

Visualize what you want to do before you do it. Visualization is so powerful that when you know what you want, you will get it. (Audrey Flack)

A person without imagination is like a teabag without hot water. (Alan Fletcher)

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all. (Anatole France)

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination. (Northrop Frye)

The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies. (Neil Gaiman)

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality. (Jules de Gaultier)

Artists are supposed to be the ones with imagination. A good part of our job description is to get regular people to use theirs. (Robert Genn)

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth. (Jean Giraudoux)

- unsourced...
Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model. (Vincent van Gogh)

Imagination is libertarian and can only triumph in that interior space where all will is silent. This is where the illuminated marvel solely manifests itself. (Henri Gougaud)

Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of source of their wonders. (Francisco de Goya)

Harness the imagination, for she is the whole of happiness. (Baltasar Gracian)

Our imagination just needs space. It's all it needs, that moment where you just sort of stare into the distance where your brain gets to sort of somehow rise up. (Glen Hansard)

I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imagination. Therefore what has been retained in the mind's eye is what lives... and that becomes the truism of the creative artist. (Marsden Hartley)

If imagination would disentangle itself from absurdities, soon we should have it harnessed to reason, pulling the same plough. (Henry S. Haskins)

An artist who has no imagination is a mechanic. (Robert Henri)

Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix... (Werner Herzog)

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination. Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth. (Napoleon Hill)

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent. (David Hockney)

We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination. (Sherlock Holmes)

No amount of skilful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. (Edward Hopper)

An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance. (Richard Hugo)

Imagination is intelligence with an erection. (Victor Hugo)

Imagination allows you to fly with angels, sleep with the devil and create art of dreams for the future. (John Hunt)

Imagination comes in after we have experience. (William Morris Hunt)

- Sculptor's Daughter...
Everyone must imagine his own snakes because no one else's snakes can ever be as awful. (Tove Jansson)

Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it. (Robinson Jeffers)

You can't impose austerity on the imagination. (Jonathan Jones)

Imagination is the eye of the soul. (Joseph Joubert)

We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this becomes a real art... Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the single growth of the psychic processes in peace. (Carl Gustav Jung)

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. (John Keats)

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination – what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not. (John Keats)

It's amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions. (Charles F. Kettering)

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer. (Charles F. Kettering)

I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life. (Oskar Kokoschka)

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. (Ursula K. LeGuin)

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it. (Ursula K. LeGuin)

Take imagination breaks... Relaxed attention is one of the most important states of mind for creativity, and sometimes it has to be learned. (Nita Leland)

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination. (Sam Levenson)

Imagination is a very precise thing, you know – it is not fantasy; the man who invented the wheel while he was observing another man walking – that is imagination! (Jacques Lipchitz)

Unless you periodically unbind yourself from the world as it is given to you from moment to moment, you will fail to release those qualities of your mind that can generate images of the world as you would prefer it to be or the world as you declare it to be. (Peter London)

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar. (Thomas B. Macaulay)

For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination. (Maxwell Maltz)

It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more. (Edouard Manet)

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind. (Agnes Martin)

Imagination is your only limitation. (Deb Martz)

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young. (W. Somerset Maugham)

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind. (W. Somerset Maugham)

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience? (Rollo May)

Imagination takes humility, love, and great courage. (Carson McCullers)

-instructor spoke quietly four words from the back of the room...
Let's get imaginative here. (Strother McMinn)

To be willing to live within the imagination is to commit oneself to the gathering together of the pieces that might begin to form a self. To avoid this territory is to avoid the encounters that might validate, inform, or enhance one's experience. (Deena Metzger)

We need ways to unstructure our imaginations to explore the outer limits and dazzling variety of our concepts, so that we can go beyond the typical and concoct wonderfully unusual ideas. (Michael Michalko)

Painters are not in any way unsociable through pride, but either because they find few pursuits equal to painting, or in order not to corrupt themselves with the useless conversation of idle people, and debase the intellect from the lofty imaginations in which they are always absorbed. (Michelangelo)

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. (Michelangelo)

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination. (James A. Michener)

Imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. (Henry Miller)

Sunflowers are like people to me. (Joan Mitchell)

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. (Maria Mitchell)

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined. (Navarre Scott Momaday)

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. (Maria Montessori)

Nothing can dither the imagination of Humankind... (Brad Michael Moore)

I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene. (Grandma Moses)

I do not hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them gleich alles zusammen – at the same time all together. (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)

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)

-on painting July Sunset...
This is not an actual scene, I made it all up... I drew it from my imagination rightside up, then painted it upside down, then corrected it rightside up to make it believable. It's all about the mood. (C. W. Mundy)

Imagination comes of not having things. (LeRoy Neiman)

Camus says in The Stranger that reason is the enemy of imagination. Sometimes you have to put reason aside and make something beautiful. (Oscar Niemeyer)

A man's life is colored by the dye of his imagination. (Louis Nizer)

In the right state of mind poetic images come forth - some in dreams and some right from the end of the brush. (Mishcka O'Connor)

I like an empty wall because I can imagine what I like on it. (Georgia O'Keeffe)

Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world. Look at something and think what else it might be. (Roger von Oech)

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. (Mary Oliver)

Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going. (Mary Oliver)

Creating space on a flat piece of paper is an amazing leap of the imagination. (Hilary Page)

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in the world. (Blaise Pascal)

The imagination is a spiritual apparatus. Unable to invent the world, it does the next best thing, and that is to assemble it piecemeal, ugly and strange, bright and clear, and dumbly discovered. (Jan Peacock)

Imagination is the true magic carpet. (Norman Vincent Peale)

One can stare stupidly at phenomena; but in the absence of imagination they will not connect themselves together in a rational way. (Charles S. Peirce)

-on Marc Chagall...
He must have an angel in his head. (Pablo Picasso)

Everything you can imagine is real. (Pablo Picasso)

All paintings start with concept, which is another word for image or imagination. The mistake is to isolate the concept as if the idea did not need to be given permanent form. (Joseph Plaskett)

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. (Edgar Allan Poe)

Artists draw what they think... and what they have seen also. But sometimes they draw from their imaginations something that doesn't exist anywhere in the world. (Pudlo Pudlat)

The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination will be the greatest. (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)

The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized. (M. C. Richards)

The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment. (Tony Robbins)

Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves. (Sir Ken Robinson)

The great gift of the human imagination is that it has no limits or ending. (Jim Rohn)

- Creating Money: Attracting Abundance...
Make your imaginings so real that they feel possible to create rather than like wishful and distant fantasies. (Sanaya Roman)

This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. (Mark Rothko)

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind. (Salman Rushdie)

-on Marc Chagall...
Objects rarely if ever bore their natural hues: cows were likely to be blue, horses green, people red, in a world without gravity. (John Russell)

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere. (Carl Sagan)

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

-on Lawren Harris...
His icebergs are strange monuments with a symbol embodied in their form and their colours. They do not freeze you when you look at them, for they are not of ice, they are what Lawren Harris feels and thinks after he has contemplated them (J. D. Salinger)

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys. (Johann Friedrich von Schiller)

The imagination is a place all by itself. A separate country. Now, you've heard of the French nation, the British nation. Well, this is the Imagi-nation. It's a wonderful place. (George Seaton)

The largest and most vivid high definition screen in the world is one's imagination. (Ian Semple)

To act in an independent manner, you must begin to initiate action that you want to occur physically by creating it in your own being. This is done by combining belief, emotion and imagination, and forming them into a mental picture of the desired physical result. (Seth)

You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me. (Peter Shaffer)

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, / Are of imagination all compact... (William Shakespeare)

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will. (George Bernard Shaw)

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

I want people to be able to imagine life outside of the circumscribed stereotype... Imagination allows you to bend the rules of the temporal world. I just want them to see that a more beautiful world exists beyond the confines of your environment. (Amy Sherald)

I have never been anywhere that equaled my imagination. (Tom Shropshire)

We are all potentially characters in a novel - with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full. (Georges Simenon)

I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination. (Anna Deavere Smith)

If there is truth in art, it is the artist's own truth. If beauty is involved, it is only the metaphor of imagination. (David Smith)

All that you can imagine you already know. (Stephen Spender)

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused. (Baruch Spinoza)

- East of Eden...
My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day. (John Steinbeck)

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things. (Wallace Stevens)

The imagination is man's power over nature. (Wallace Stevens)

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. (Wallace Stevens)

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. (Tom Stoppard)

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem. (Mark Strand)

Whatever man does he must do first in his mind. (Albert Szent-Gyorgyi)

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive. (Henry David Thoreau)

It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination. (Henry David Thoreau)

The world is but a canvas to the imagination. (Henry David Thoreau)

The imagination must not be given too much material. It must be denied food so that it can work for itself. (Macedonlo de la Torre)

You cannot hear the waterfall if you stand next to it. I paint my jungles in the desert. (Macedonlo de la Torre)

In my mind I have finer pictures than ever before. Ten thousand pictures come and go every day and those are the only complete pictures painted, pictures that shall never be polluted by paint and canvas. (John H. Twachtman)

-The American Claimant...
It is a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed. (Mark Twain)

A lively imagination is one of the best companions. (Frank Tyger)

Imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. (Brenda Ueland)

In one's own mind there are millions upon millions of streams and rivers to paint. (Author unknown)

Imagination is the cinema of coming events. (Author unknown)

Whatever one man is capable of imagining, other men will prove themselves capable of realizing. (Jules Verne)

The idea or the faculty of imagination serves as both rudder and bridle to the senses, inasmuch as the thing imagined moves the sense. (Leonardo da Vinci)

One supreme fact which I have discovered is that it is not willpower, but fantasy-imagination that creates. Imagination is the creative force. Imagination creates reality. (Richard Wagner)

You have all the reason in the world to achieve your grandest dreams. Imagination plus innovation equals realization. (Denis Waitley)

The artist, having cleansed his own doors of perception, has the role of leading us to see more clearly, through the eyes of the eternal imagination. (Marney Ward)

I just imagined you were a camera. (William Wegman)

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. (Simone Weil)

There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny. (Edith Wharton)

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination. (Alfred North Whitehead)

Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative. (Oscar Wilde)

An inner process stands in need of outward criteria. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Imagination! lifting up itself / Before the eye and progress of my Song... (William Wordsworth)

The living can assist the imagination of the dead... (William Butler Yeats)

I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel. (Peter Nivio Zarlenga)

That which leaves little to the imagination is contrasted by that which nurtures the imagination. (Jan Zawadzki)

The Japanese, if I understand them, are masters of the unsaid and the unstated, of subtlety and ambiguity, all of which constitute powerful stimulants to the imagination. (Semir Zeki)