Imagination

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
~ William Blake

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?
~ William Blake

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity . . . and some scarce see Nature at all. But, to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself.
~ William Blake, in The Letters of William Blake (1956). Letter to the Reverend John Trusler (23 August 1799)

The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.
~ William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment (c. 1810).

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
~ William Blake, from Jerusalem (1804).

What is now proved was once only imagined.
~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93). Proverbs of Hell

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, "Just watch!"
~ Bill Bradley, Artisan (October 1998). Values of the Game

A partner evoked by sophisticated electric brain stimulation could be as real and much more satisfying than the boy or girl next door. . . . All the stars in Hollywood living or dead are there for your pleasure. Sated with superstars, you can lay Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Isis, Madame Pompadour, or Aphrodite. You can get f[*]cked by Pan, Jesus Christ, Apollo or the Devil himself.
~ William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine (1985). Civilian Defense

Fancy has an extensive influence in morals. Some of the most powerful and dangerous feelings, as ambition and envy, derive their principal nourishment from a source so trivial. Its effects on the common affairs of life are greater than might be supposed. Naked reality would scarcely keep the world in motion.
~ William Benton (W.B.) Clulow, Aphorisms and Reflections: A Miscellany of Thought and Opinion (1843).

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,
barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window
in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,
offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
~ Billy Collins, The Art of Drowning (1995). Tuesday, June 4, 1991

Where'er we turn, by Fancy charm'd, we find
Some sweet illusion of the cheated mind.
~ William Collins, in The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins (1802). An Epistle, Addressed To Sir Thomas Hanmer, On His Edition Of Shakspeare's Works (1743)

I think my securities far outweigh my insecurities. I am not nearly as afraid of myself and my imagination as I used to be.
~ Billy Connolly

For her the Fancy, roving unconfined,
The present muse of every pensive mind,
Works magic wonders, adds a brighter hue
To Nature's scenes than Nature ever knew.
~ William Cowper, Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools (1784).

While fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.
~ William Cowper, The Task (1785). Book IV. The Winter Evening

Imagination is as good as many voyages -- and how much cheaper.
~ George William Curtis

If I were asked what has been the most powerful force in the making of history, you would probably adjudge of unbalanced mind were I to answer, as I should have to answer, metaphor figurative expression. It is by imagination that men have lived; imagination rules all our lives. The human mind is not, as philosophers would have you think, a debating hall, but a picture gallery. Around it hangs our similes, our concepts.
~ William (W.) MacNeile Dixon, The Human Situation (1937).

In comics, images are generally impressionistic. Usually, they are rendered with economy in order to facilitate their usefulness as a language. Because experience precedes analysis, the intellectual digestive process is accelerated by the imagery provided by comics.
~ Will Eisner, Graphic Storytelling (1996).

There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.
~ William Godwin

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.
~ William Godwin

In the outset of life . . . our imagination has a body to it.
~ William Hazlitt, in The Liberal (No. 3, 1823). My First Acquaintance with Poets

The imagination is of so delicate a texture, that even words wound it.
~ William Hazlitt, in Selected Essays of William Hazlitt (1930). Characteristics (written in 1823)

Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with rest; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm us.
~ Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action (1792). Chapter 1

Fantasy, or Imagination, are the names given to the faculty of reproducing copies of originals once felt. The imagination is called 'reproductive' when the copies are literal; productive' when elements from different originals are recombined so as to make new wholes.
~ William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890). Vol. 2. Chapter XVIII: Imagination

If I need a cause for celebration
Or a comfort I can use to ease my mind
I rely on my imagination
And I dream of an imaginary time.
~ Billy Joel, in The Stranger (1977 album). Everybody Has a Dream

The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful recourse of the divine spirit, almost an amphibian between being and not being.
~ Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938).

It is want of imagination that prevents people from seeing things from any point of view but their own, and it is unreasonable to be angry with them because they lack this faculty.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938).

If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
~ William Maxwell

The traditional Freudian theory is that men are very attracted to phallic extensions and they have a set of fantasies that originates in their bodies -- fantasies that tend toward power and aggression.
~ Dr. Nancy McWilliams, (Interview; 1999)

To visualize is to see what is not there, what is not real -- a dream. To visualize is, in fact, to make visual lies. Visual lies, however, have a way of coming true.
~ Peter McWilliams, DO IT! Let's Get Off Our Buts (1994). Part Four: Becoming Passionate About Your Dream

It is the child-like part of us that produces works of imagination.
~ William Morris, from News from Nowhere (1890). XVI. Dinner in the Hall of the Bloomsbury Market

What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate -- and immediately forget we have done so.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1885-86).

All impediments in fancy's course
Are motives of more fancy.
~ William Shakespeare, All's Well that Ends Well. Act V, scene iii

Come, let's away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds I' th' cage.
~ William Shakespeare, King Lear. Act V, scene iii

Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.
~ William Shakespeare, King Lear. Act IV, scene vi

I am giddy, expectation whirls me round.
The imaginary relish is so sweet
That it enchants my sense.
~ William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act V, scene i

Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act V, scene i

Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.
~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Tell me where is fancy bred.
Or in the heart or in the head?
~ William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

The idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life,
Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit,
More moving -- delicate and full of life
Into the eye and prospect of his soul.
~ William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing. Act IV, scene i

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act V, scene i

Nothing limits achievement like small thinking; nothing expands possibilities like unleashed imagination.
~ William Arthur Ward

The difference between fantasy and science fiction is that one has honest politicians, scrupulous lawyers, and altruistic doctors, while the other only has beings from outer space.
~ William John Watkins

I'd like to have the opportunity to draw this strip for years and see where it goes. It's sort of a scary thing now to imagine; these cartoonists who've been drawing a strip for twenty years. I can't imagine coming up with that much material. If I just take it day by day, though, it's a lot of fun, and I do think I have a long way to go before I've exhausted the possibilities.
~ Bill Watterson, Honk Magazine (Interview; 1986).

Mid earthly scenes, forgotten or unknown,
Live in ideal worlds, and wander there alone.
~ Carlos Wilcox, in Remains of the Rev. Carlos Wilcox (1828). The Religion of Taste

I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!
~ Thomas Lanier ("Tennessee") Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).

I'd like to imagine that in order to beat me a person would have to play almost perfect tennis.
~ Venus Williams, The Associated Press (29 July 2002). V. Williams Wins Bank of the West

You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream: you manufacture illusions.
~ Thomas Lanier ("Tennessee") Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1944). Scene Seven

Life is valuable -- when completed by the imagination. And then only.
~ William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All (1923).

Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible, to keep beside growing understanding.
~ William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All (1923).

There is neither beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.
~ William Carlos Williams

We're not just afraid of predators, we're transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters.
~ Edward Osborne (E.O.) Wilson, Quoted in Reader's Digest (January 2001). Reality Bites

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.
~ Edmund Wilson

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations -- like that of artistic imagination.
~ Edmund Wilson

But thou that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation.
~ William Wordsworth, Yarrow Visited. Stanza 6

Such place to me is sometimes like a dream
Or map of the whole world: thoughts, link by link,
Enter through ears and eyesight, with such gleam
Of all things, that at last in fear I shrink,
And leap at once from the delicious stream.
~ William Wordsworth, How sweet it is, when mother Fancy rocks (1806).

[T]he mightiest lever known to the moral world, imagination.
~ William Wordsworth, from Ecclesiastical Sonnets. In Series (1821-22), Part I. XXXIV. Crusades

A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream.
~ William Butler Yeats, from The Wild Swans at Coole (1917). The Fisherman

Renounce that drudgery,
Call the Muses home.
~ William Butler Yeats, from New Poems (1938). Those Images

In Imagination only we find a Human Faculty that touches nature at one side, and spirit on the other. Imagination may be described as that which is sent bringing spirit to nature, entering into nature, and seemingly losing its spirit, that nature being revealed as symbol may lose the power to delude.
~ William Butler Yeats, from The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical (1893). Preface