Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Imagination

"The body travels more easily than the mind, and until we have limbered up our imagination we continue to think as though we had stayed home. We have not really budged a step until we take up residence in someone else's point of view." - Thomas Erskine, Lord Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine

"The very core of peace and love is imagination. All altruism springs from putting yourself in the other person's place." - Harry Emerson Fosdick

"How to teach rigor while preserving imagination is an unsolved challenge to education." - Ralph Gerard, fully Ralph Waldo Gerard

"It is by faith that poetry, as well as devotion, soars above this dull earth; that imagination breaks through its clouds, breathes a purer air, and lives in a softer light." - Henry Giles

"Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death!... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil." - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a.k.a. Charlotte Anna (nee Perkins), Charlotte Perkins Stetson

"We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth." - Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux

"Imagination is nature's equal, sensuality her slave." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Reality surpasses imagination; and we see, breathing, brightening, and moving before our eyes sights dearer to our hearts than any we ever beheld in the land of sleep." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"An uncontrolled imagination may become as surely intoxicated by over-indulgence as a toper may do bodily with strong drink." - Thomas Haliburton, fully Thomas Chandler Haliburton, pseudonym "Sam Slick"

"Men as yet need some help to their imagination. There remains still room for a little illusion. It is better for men, it is better for women, that each somewhat idealize the other. Much is lost when life has lost its atmosphere, and is reduced to naked fact." - Gail Hamilton, Pseud. of Mary A. Dodge

"Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power which, if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or a Shakespeare." - Frederick Henry Hedge

"Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the function of the imagination." - Ernest Hemingway, fully Ernest Miller Hemingway

"There is nothing in man that must be held in check as the imagination - the most mobile and most dangerous of all our capacities." - Johann Gottfried von Herder

"Imagination, whatever may be said to the contrary, will always hold a place in history, as truth does in romance. Has not romance been penned with history in view?" - Arsène Houssaye

"Imagination is the organ through which the soul within us recognizes a soul without us; the spiritual eye by which the mind perceives and converses with the spiritualities of nature under her material forms; which tends to exalt eve the senses into soul by discerning a soul in the objects of sense." - Henry Norman Hudson

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out of itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty." - David Hume

"Notwithstanding the empire of the imagination, there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently together, and makes the one, upon its appearance, introduce the other... These principles of association are reduced to three, viz. Resemblance... Contiguity... Causation... as it is by means of thought only that any thing operates upon our passions, and as these are only ties of our thought, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them." - David Hume

"The memory, senses, and understanding are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas." - David Hume

"A myth is a collective 'dream' of an entire people at a certain point in their history... But a myth not only lives in literature and imagination, it immediately finds its way into the behavior and attitudes of the culture - into the practical daily lives of the people." - Robert A. Johnson

"Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity." -

"Many have no happier moments than those that they pass in solitude, abandoned to their imagination, which sometimes puts scepters in their hands or miters on their heads, shifts the scene of pleasure with endless variety, bids all the forms of beauty sparkle before them, and gluts them with every change of visionary luxury." -

"The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." -

"Wealth is nothing in itself; it is not useful but when it departs from us; its value is found only in that which it can purchase. As to corporeal enjoyment, money can neither open new avenues of pleasure, nor block up the passages of anguish. Disease and infirmity still continue to torture and enfeeble, perhaps exasperated by luxury, or promoted by softness. With respect to the mind, it has rarely been observed that wealth contributes much to quicken the discernment or elevate the imagination, but may, by hiring flattery, or laying diligence asleep, confirm error and harden stupidity." -

"Based on some estimates, guns are statistically like rats. They outnumber our population. Not surprisingly, our output of ammunition for civilian firearms almost staggers the imagination. American industry outdoes all other nations in the production of bullets. Nearly 5 billion rounds of ammunition flow through the marketplace each year. that is enough, laid end to end, to stretch a bandoleer of ammunition three times around the equator. All of those bullets could not only wipe out the world’s entire human population, but they could decimate practically most of the world’s species of wildlife." - Ted Kennedy, fully Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy

"How shall man obtain conception of the majesty of the Divine...? Through the expansion of his scientific faculties; through the liberation of his imagination...; through the disciplined study of the world and of life; through the cultivation of a rich, multifarious sensitivity to every phase of being. All these desiderata require obviously the study of all the branches of wisdom, all the philosophies of life, all the ways of the diverse civilizations and doctrines of ethics and religion in every nation and tongue." - Abraham Isaac Kook

"When our desires are fulfilled, we never fail to realize the wealth of imagination and the paucity of reality." -

"We are poor, indeed, when we have no half-wishes left us. The heart and the imagination close the shutters the instant they are gone." - Walter Savage Landor

"No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination." - George Henry Lewes

"The Divine Mind communicates with the human mind through the imagination. A prayer, therefore, should be offered in the form of a mental image. Man must visualize the thing he desires, he must use his imaginative powers to form his petition in terms clearly outlined in his own mind. The profound concentration of attention and thought which this form of prayer requires fills also the heart with deep earnestness and devotion. Man must pray whole-heartedly as well as wholemindedly; he must believe in his heart that his well-being depends completely upon his prayer." - Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein

"Man is free in his imagination, but bound by his reason." - Israel Salanter Lipkin

"Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of the saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us." - James Russell Lowell

"Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, not a quality; its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as the servant of the will. Imagination, as too often understood, is mere fantasy - the image-making power, common to all who have the gift of dreams." - James Russell Lowell

"In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals." -

"Take two workers in an organization. One limits his giving by wages he is paid. He insists on being paid instantly for what he does. That shows he is a man of limited imagination and intelligence. The other is a natural giver. His philosophy of life compels him to make himself useful. He knows that if he takes care of other people's problems they will be forced to take care of him to protect their own interests. The more a man gives of himself to his work, the more he will get out of it, both in wages and satisfaction." - Compton Mackenzie, fully Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie

"Conspicuous waste beyond the imagination of Thorstein Veblen has become the mark of American life. As a nation we find ourselves overbuilt, if not overhoused; overfed, although millions of poor people are undernourished; overtransported in overpowered cars; and also... overdefended or overdefensed." - Eugene McCarthy, fully Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy

"The Imagination makes us transcendent of Time and we see what is gorgeous." - Michael McClure

"We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves... The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined." - N. Scott Momaday, fully Navarre Scott Momaday

"Many things seem greater by imagination than be effect." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." -

"The plays of natural lively children are the infancy of art. Children live in a world of imagination and feeling. They invest the most insignificant object with any form they please, and see in it whatever they wish to see." - Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager

"Great strides in human progress are being made by men who delve deeply into the imagination, then through the medium of hard work, bring fancy into reality." - Robert K. Patterson

"War is, after all, the universal perversion. We are all tainted: if we cannot experience our perversion at first hand we spend our time reading war stories, the pornography of war; or seeing war films, the blue films of war; or titillating our senses with the imagination of great deeds, the masturbation of war." -

"Romances, in general, are calculated rather to fire the imagination than to inform the judgment." - Samuel Richardson

"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. Not being able to enlarge the one, let us contract the other; for it is from their difference that all evils arise which render us unhappy." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"As long as man dwells in a state of pure nature (I mean pure and not coarse nature), all his being acts at once like a simple sensuous unity, like a harmonious whole. The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions; a priori they are not yet in contradiction to each other. Then the feelings of man are not the formless play of chance; nor are his thoughts an empty play of imagination, without any value. His feelings proceed from the law of necessity, his thoughts from reality. But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity. The harmony that existed as a fact in the former state, the harmony of feeling and thought, only exists in an ideal state. It is no longer in him, but out of him; it is a conception of thought which he must begin by realizing in himself; it is no longer a fact, a reality of his life." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"Union does everything when it is perfect; it satisfies desires, it simplifies needs, it foresees the wishes of the imagination; it is an aisle always open, and becomes a constant fortune." - Étienne Pivert de Senancour

"The works of a person that builds begin immediately to decay, while those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building; which, were it to remain in equal perfection, would at best begin to moulder and want repairs in imagination. Now trees have a circumstance that suits our taste and that is annual variety." - William Shenstone

"To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives; it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surprise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more securely." - Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith