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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." - Albert Einstein

"Logic [knowledge] will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." - Albert Einstein

"The allure of eternal life has been tugging at the human imagination since we first began to contemplate our finitude." - Craig Hamilton

"We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were implanted in his imagination, no matter how utterly his reason may reject them." -

"An imagination is the gate to a world of dreams." - Amy Kleer

"Bad teaching is teaching which presents an endless procession of meaningless signs, words and rules, and fails to arouse the imagination." - W. W. Sawyer, fully Walter Warwick Sawyer

"Every moment of fulfillment or consummation symbolically defeats the idea of death. It is as if our experience proclaimed to the world: "Though I will die, at least I have achieved this much." Through deeds that are humane, artistic, or merely nurturing, the imagination propels us into a time when we will no longer be, but whatever we care about will survive and possibly prevail. We know we will die, but we deploy our energies toward possible occurrences that project themselves through life as if it continues in the future." - Irving Singer

"An idea is salvation by imagination." -

"Can art be completely invented? It’s a matter of shaping reality with the help of imagination." - Aharon Appelfeld

"Can art be completely invented? It’s a matter of shaping reality with the help of imagination." -

"Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination." - Alfred North Whitehead

"A man who has no imagination has no wings." -

"Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, which takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is." - Author Unknown NULL

"Worry is the misuse of imagination." - Author Unknown NULL

"[The Bible] Its object is not to convince the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination." -

"That youthful fervor, which is sometimes called enthusiasm, but which is a heat of imagination subsequently discovered to be inconsistent with the experience of actual life." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"Man is born to believe, and if no church comes forward with all the title deeds of truths... he will find alters and idols in his own heart and his own imagination." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"We are not indebted to the Reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress… Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"From childhood upwards, everything is done to make the minds of men and women conventional and sterile. And if, by misadventure, some spark of imagination remains, its unfortunate possessor is considered unsound and dangerous, worthy only of contempt in time of peace and of prison or a traitor’s death in time of war." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those who promote life do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal, something that appears to imagination to live in a heaven remote from strife and failure and the devouring jaws of Time." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"Losses are comparative, imagination only makes them of any moment." - Blaise Pascal

"Imagination cannot makes fools wise; but she can make them happy, to the envy of reason, who can only make her friends miserable." - Blaise Pascal

"Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world." - Blaise Pascal

"Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity; to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside." - Blaise Pascal

"What but this faculty of imagination dispenses reputation, awards respect and veneration to persons, works, laws, and the great? How insufficient are all the riches of the earth without her consent!" - Blaise Pascal

"Imagination decides everything." - Blaise Pascal

"It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative." - Cesare Pavese

"The surest road to health, say what they will, is never to suppose that we shall be ill. Most of those evils we poor mortals know from doctors and imagination flow." - Charles Churchill

"Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future." -

"Wisdom is the tears of experience, the bridge of experience and imagination over time. It is the listening heart, the melancholy sigh, the distillation of despair to provide a realistic, if often despondent, view of the world." - Daniel Bell

"By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment." - Dorothea Brande

"Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism." - Dorothy Thompson

"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led." - Edgar Allan Poe

"No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination." - Edward Hopper

"The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection , which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character." - Emma Goldman

"Prejudices subsist in people's imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience." - Ernest Dimnet

"Imagination I understand to be the representation of an individual thought. Imagination is of three kinds: joined with belief of that which is to come; joined with memory of that which is past; and of things present." - Francis Bacon

"The justest division of human learning is that derived from the three different faculties of the soul, the seat of learning; history being relative to the memory, poetry to the imagination, and philosophy to the reason." - Francis Bacon

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is." - Francis Bacon

"An idea is salvation by imagination." - Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright

"What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries." - George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne

"It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways... But besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them, and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul or my self. By which words I do not denote any of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consist in being perceived." - George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne

"The notion that there is and can be but one time, and that half of it is always intrinsically past and the other half always intrinsically future, belongs to the normal pathology of an animal mind: it marks the egoistical outlook of an active being endowed with imagination. Such a being will project the moral contrast produced by his momentary absorption in action upon the conditions and history of that action, and upon the universe at large. A perspective of hope and one of reminiscence divide for him a specious eternity; and for him the dramatic centre of existence, though always a different point in physical time, will always be precisely in himself." - George Santayana

"To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be." - George Santayana

"Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends." - George Santayana

"Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their centre." - George Santayana