Quotes · Skopia

16 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Imagination✕clear

Imagination labors best in distant fields.

The Innocents Abroad · 1869

★ 7.8

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!

Soren Kierkegaard

Either Or · 1843

★ 7.0

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face.

Jean-Dominique Bauby

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly · 1997

★ 4.3

O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?

William Shakespeare

1595

★ 3.8

Play · Problem play

I am giddy; expectation whirls me round. Th' imaginary relish is so sweet That it enchants my sense.

William Shakespeare

Troilus and Cressida · 1603

★ 3.8

He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination.

Middlemarch · 1872

★ 3.8

Essay · Political literature

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning.

Reflections on the Guillotine · 1957

★ 3.7

Philosophical literature

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

1605

★ 3.6

Psychological literature

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Psychological Types · 1921

★ 3.5

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

1929

★ 3.5

Scientific literature

Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.

Gerald M. Edelman

2000

★ 3.5

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.

The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard · 1881

★ 2.9

Children's literature

Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot.

Where the Wild Things Are · 1963

★ 2.8

Interview · Magazine

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

1929

★ 2.1

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—whether it existed before or not.

1817

★ 1.9

His heart was in his garden; but his brain Wandered at will among the fiery stars.

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

1860

★ 1.9