Gary Taphouse

Imagination is accepted as the innate ability and process to invent partial or complete personal realms within the mind from elements derived from sense perceptions of the shared world.

Sourced

• For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
  • Selected Literary Essays by C.S. Lewis, 1969.

• Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compared to those angels whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings.
  • A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume, Book 1, Section 4, p.225

• Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
  • Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers by Richard Rorty, Volume 3, 1998.

• The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.
  • Our Knowledge of the External World by Bertrand Russell

• The true function of logic,... as applied to matters of experience,... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.
  • Our Knowledge of the External World by Bertrand Russell

• Science does not know its debt to imagination.
  • Poetry and Imagination by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1872.

• Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
  • Introduction to Men at War by Ernest Hemingway, 1942.

• All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
  • T. E. Lawrence, Introductory Chapter. Variant: This, therefore, is a faded dream of the time when I went down into the dust and noise of the Eastern market-place, and with my brain and muscles, with sweat and constant thinking, made others see my visions coming true. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.

• There is no life I know
  that compares to pure imagination
  Living there you'll be free
  if you truly wish to be
  • Pure Imagination by Gene Wilder, 1971.

• Impossibility is only the figment of an insufficient imagination.
  • The Song Of Sin by Phil Duncan, 1998.

Unsourced

• I believe imagination is our greatest asset, as human beings, and I believe it is our best, perhaps our only weapon against despair. I believe imagination is our best, our ultimate means of survival, all of us together -- each of us apart.
  • Timothy Findley

• Imagination. Imagination. Imagination. It sustains, it alters, it redeems.
  • Saul Bellow

• Imagination is more important than knowledge.
  • Albert Einstein

• Imagination is your key to unlock the hidden wonders of our world.
  • Dreamfinder, original Journey Into Imagination ride at Epcot

• 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

• Mon incompréhension est ma plus grande qualité car elle laisse une place a l'imagination.
  • Carréric Benjamin (Jabamin) 27/06/2006

• Nothing is impossible - not if you can imagine it!
  • Hubert Farnsworth, Futurama

• You cannot imagine infinity but your imagination is infinite.
  • Michael Grasso, 1990

• Imagine.
  • John Lennon

• Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
  • George Bernard Shaw

• Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.
  • Walt Disney