Motivational Quotes

Imagination

Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the vacuum wireless light, my turbine engine and many other devices have all been developed in exactly this way.

- Tesla, Nikola

Best Quotes about Imagination

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

Berger, John

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.

Maltz, Maxwell

Anyone who thinks the sky is the limit, has limited imagination.

The great successful men of the world have used their imaginations... they think ahead and create their mental picture, and the go to work materializing that picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building -- steadily building.

Collier, Robert

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

Charles F. Kettering

It is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest.

Ruskin, John

There is nothing more dreadful than imagination without taste.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.

Jules de Gaultier

10.

Man is an imagining being.

Bachelard, Gaston

11.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

Mencken, H. L.

12.

You cannot depend on your judgments when your imagination is out of focus.

Twain, Mark

13.

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

Bunuel, Luis

14.

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

15.

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

Brande, Dorothea

16.

Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions.

Einstein, Albert

17.

Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.

Bacall, Lauren

18.

Death is the tyrant of the imagination.

Cornwall, Barry

19.

See the things you want as already yours. Think of them as yours, as belonging to you, as already in your possession.

Collier, Robert

20.

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.

Einstein, Albert

21.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

Johnson, Samuel

22.

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

Nabokov, Vladimir

23.

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.

Verne, Jules

24.

Make every thought, every fact, that comes into your mind pay you a profit. Make it work and produce for you. Think of things not as they are but as they might be. Don't merely dream -- but create!

Collier, Robert

25.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

Einstein, Albert

27.

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

Kettering, Charles F.

28.

If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.

Ward, William A.

29.

Imagination decides everything.

Pascal, Blaise

30.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilizer. It is important to recognize that in our time man has not written one word, thought one thought, put two notes or two bricks together, splashed color on to canvas or concrete into space, in a manner which will be of any conceivable imaginative interest to posterity.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

31.

Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.

Schuller, Robert H.

32.

When you see a thing clearly in your mind, your creative success mechanism within you takes over and does the job much better than you could do it by conscious effort or willpower.

Maltz, Maxwell

33.

Tesla, Nikola

34.

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

Jung, Carl

35.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

Sentiment is the ripened fruit of fantasy.

Belazy, Madame

37.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Covey, Stephen R.

38.

Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?

Blake, William

40.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in this world.

Pascal, Blaise

42.

If you clearly and vividly IMAGINE yourself in the first person doing, being, having the things and qualities you truly want... then you will be using positive imagination to begin a change to fulfilling that image.

43.

It takes as much imagination to create debt as to create income.

Orr, Leonard

44.

Soft focus is an important skill that can effect us metaphorically. In other words, the way we see the future has everything to do with how well we can look up and see the expanded horizon before us.

Kline, Peter

45.

Image creates desire. You will what you imagine.

Gallimore, J. G.

46.

One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.

Joubert, Joseph

47.

Imagination is not a talent of some people but is the health of everyone.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

The imagination is man's power over nature.