The 43 Best Quotes On Imagination

In this post, we share the best quotes on imagination that we could find. These are the 43 best quotes on imagination.

What Is Imagination?

According to Oxford, it is ‘The faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images, or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.’ and ‘The ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful.’

Writers are always creating something that was not there before, something that cannot be touched and smelled and seen, and so it makes sense that imagination is important in this process. It allows you to feel empathy and compassion.

You can also use your imagination to solve problems.

Suggested Further reading:

1. What Is Imagination & Why Is It Important For Fiction Writing?
2. 7 Reasons Why ‘What If?’ Is The Most Important Question You Can Ask As A Writer
3. 5 Steps To Creativity In Writing

The 43 Best Quotes On Imagination

1. You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn’t exist. ~Azar Nafisi
2. 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
3. Imagination is the eye of the soul. ~Joseph Joubert
4. Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning. ~Gloria Steinem
5. A book is a device to ignite the imagination. ~Alan Bennett
6. If you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything. ~Alice Walker
7. Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality. ~Jules de Gaultier
8. The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau
9. Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon. ~Ann Patchett
10. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. ~Carl Sagan
11. And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. ~Sylvia Plath
12. What is now proved was once only imagined. ~William Blake
13. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. ~Albert Einstein
14. Everything you can imagine is real. ~Pablo Picasso
15. I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death. ~Robert Fulghum
16. Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one. ~Terry Pratchett
17. Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got. ~Philip José Farmer
18. I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. ~J.G. Ballard
19. You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. ~Mark Twain
20. My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it. ~Ursula K. Le Guin
21. You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. ~Anne Lamott
22. Hate is a lack of imagination. ~Graham Greene
23. Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humour to console him for what he is. ~Francis Bacon
24. To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything. ~Anatole France
25. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything. ~Henry Miller
26. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared. ~J.K. Rowling
27. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close. ~Jeanette Winterson
28. I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn’t have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn’t exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly does that, can help us for the rest of our lives. ~Lloyd Alexander
29. Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination. ~Jonathan Franzen
30. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It’s your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It’s a good thing not a bad thing. ~Ruth Ozeki
31. The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination. ~Carson McCullers
32. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
33. I believe in the goodness of imagination. ~Sue Monk Kidd
34. All human accomplishment has this 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
35. There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination. ~Virginia Woolf
36. Adults are bad at remembering how powerful they can be because somewhere along the line, they were shamed for their imagination. ~Stephen Chbosky
37. Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates. The more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive. ~Jhumpa Lahiri
38. Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine. ~Louis Aragon
39. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams – day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain-machinery whizzing – are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilisation. ~L. Frank Baum
40. The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising. ~Stephen King
41. Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination. ~Janet Frame
42. The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope. ~Henry Ward Beecher
43. We all have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge and the individual is less than nothing. But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different. ~Neil Gaiman

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 by Amanda Patterson

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Top Tip: Find out more about our workbooks and online courses in our shop.