A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
George Santayana

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.
Margaret Mahy

But I'm not imaginative. I couldn't look into the future, like Star Wars or Robots or anything like that.
Harry Dean Stanton

Children are so creative and imaginative that they just bring you to life all over again.
Moira Kelly

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.
Alfred North Whitehead

God is only a great imaginative experience.
David Herbert Lawrence

I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.
Jonathan Demme

I like the fact that kids are willing to be imaginative and go along with me when I'm telling strange tales.
Margaret Haddix

I spoke French a bit, and I could speak a bit of this and that, and when you were taught those things by people who couldn't really do it, you can do some pretty wonderfully, imaginative horrific things to teachers.
Diane Cilento

I think being an artist, or just being creative, or imaginative, or aware, where I think everybody starts out, and by about the age of 10, that's been pretty effectively whipped out by education.
William Wiley

Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.
Walter Lippmann

If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be present.
Franz Boas

If you're an enthusiast and you love the world like I do, it comes naturally. But I think charity must become more fun to give, more interactive and imaginative.
Joanna Lumley

In this context the British and Irish governments will have to promote a new, imaginative and dynamic alternative in which both governments will share power in the north.
Gerry Adams

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.
Herman Wouk

Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.
Robert Hewison

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

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
Northrop Frye

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
Gore Vidal