imagination

Look at a full vivid painting, and look at an empty picture. If you can immediately see an entire universe within the empty picture, and absolutely nothing in the vivid painting, clarity is your friend. If you immediately see a full vivid painting and an empty picture, and see them for what they are, slavery is your friend.

He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.

You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power.("Mind Over Murder")

Use your imagination," I tell my students these days, "or someone else is going to use it for you.

Imagination is a place where all the important answers live.

It is my opinion that the isolated mind loses its purchase on reality all too easily and becomes prone to fantasy.

If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend you're in the Middle Ages. That's why I did it. That's what I was in it for.

He who doesn't fear his own imagination...is not worthy to envision.

To understand pretending is to conquer all barriers of time and space.

To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.

For him and his brother, he now knew, that music was real. Becuase all you had to do, really, was be willing to use your imagination. And listen.

In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight.

The possibilities were endless. Battles would be fought. Wonders revealed. Many journeys. Many lands. Many joys. Many sorrows.But stories all...

I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn__ see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people__ clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn__ be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn__ be satisfactory at all__r at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision_, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit.

Only worry about what you absolutely know about,' Mr. Worthington said to me, putting my mind back where it belonged. 'That's the key. Worrying about anything else is just a waste of time and emotion. I know that seems obvious but honestly, the more information you have, the less your imagination can run away with you so the secret is to find out as much as you can about what your particular problem is....and you'll be amazed at how this simplifies things. You no longer have to worry about the what ifs.

Copywriting is a design muse, it carves a beautiful masterpiece in an imaginative way.

To Vik Lovell who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs ...

Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination.