We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.
Jacob Bronowski

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Iris Murdoch

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself.
Rod Serling

To put yourself in another's place requires real imagination, but by doing so each Girl Scout will be able to love among others happily.
Juliette G. Low

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
Arthur Conan Doyle

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I've left the opera house.
Maria Callas

People can die of mere imagination.
Geoffrey Chaucer

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
Milan Kundera

He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
Washington Irving

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
W. Somerset Maugham

The woman who appeals to a man's vanity may stimulate him, the woman who appeals to his heart may attract him, but it is the woman who appeals to his imagination who gets him.
Helen Rowland

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.
Helen Rowland

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.
Lord Chesterfield

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
David Bailey