66 Inspiring Imagination Quotes

Imagination is the gateway to endless possibilities, fueling creativity, innovation, and transformation. It captures the essence of dreams and the potential to turn them into reality. In a world that often demands practicality and conformity, nurturing our imaginative spirit can reignite passion and open doors to new adventures. Whether you’re an artist seeking inspiration, an entrepreneur looking to innovate, or simply someone who cherishes the beauty of creative thought, these quotes serve as a reminder of the power imagination holds. Join us as we explore an inspiring collection of 66 quotes that celebrate and invigorate the imaginative spark within us all.

1. “Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.” - William Carlos Williams

2. “That's the way the mind works: the brain is genetically disposed towards organization, yet if not controlled, will link even the most imagerial fragment to another on the flimsiest pretense and in the most freewheeling manner, as if it takes a kind of organic pleasure in creative association, without regards to logic or chronological sequence.” - Tom Robbins

3. “Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.” - George Scialabba

4. “You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.” - Anne Lamott

5. “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” - Walt Disney

6. “I believe in the goodness of imagination.” - Sue Monk Kidd

7. “...[T]here should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.” - Anne Lamott

8. “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

9. “Hate is a lack of imagination.” - Graham Greene

10. “To see things as they really were--what an empoverishment!” - L.P. Hartley

11. “(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.” - André Breton

12. “Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.” - Oscar Wilde

13. “Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.” - Patricia A. McKillip

14. “Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.” - Pierre Janet

15. “We live in the world we made up.” - Jim Paul

16. “That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.” - Zoe Whittall

17. “Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” - Philip José Farmer

18. “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

19. “Firnis lächelte gütig. "Bücher sind lebendige Wesen", sagte er, "und wenn man ganz in sie eintaucht, dann erwachen sie zum Leben. Und wie die Gedanken, so bekommen auch die Buchstaben Flügel verliehen. Sie lösen sich vom Papier und flattern im Raum herum.” - Christoph Marzi

20. “Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.” - Milan Kundera

21. “Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” - Yoko Ono

23. “The Old Days, the Lost Days -- in the half-closed eyes of memory (and in fact) they never marched across a calendar; they huddled round a burning log, leaned on a certain table, or listened to those certain songs.” - Beryl Markham

24. “When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.” - H.P. Lovecraft

25. “Stab me if you can enjoy it - but not if it feels like a duty. Stab me vertically if I’m lying down and horizontally if I’m running” - steve aylett

26. “His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.” - Peter Redgrove

27. “Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.” - Jess C. Scott

28. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.” - Henry Adams

29. “As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one's fingers and slide into oblivion, the startling, the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost for ever in oblivion's black ocean.” - Mervyn Peake

30. “What is an idea made of? Of future, past and also meanwhile.” - Lynda Barry

31. “Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect ‘woman of mystery’ is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find.” - Alfred Hitchcock

32. “My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.” - J.K. Rowling

33. “To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

34. “There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.” - John Green

35. “Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.” - Christina Westover

36. “Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?” - Jeanette Winterson

37. “He was everything I needed because his entire character had been molded by my deepest wants and desires. He was my rock when I cried, my playmate when I laughed, and my hero when I needed to imagine that one existed for me.” - Richelle Goodrich

38. “The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the troublewith women, too." ["Existence" (1975)]” - Joanna Russ

39. “Where do you get dreams like this?” - Stephen R. Donaldson

40. “The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.” - Marcel Proust

41. “mystery is not founded in ignorance, mystery is founded in imagination” - S. Spencer Baker

42. “I know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.” - Wallace Stevens

43. “Just because it's imaginary, doesn't mean it's not real.” - T.L. Rese

44. “What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.” - Hermann Hesse

45. “No matter how hard they try, they'll never create anything so perfectly beautiful as what plays out in my own imagination.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

46. “OvermodulationBy Charlotte M Liebel-FawlsYou're a cavity in my oasis,You're a porthole in my sea,You're a stretch of the imagination every time you look at me.You're an ocean in my wineglass,You're a Steinway on the beach,You're a captivating audience, an exciting Rembrandt,A Masterpiece.” - Charlotte M. Liebel

47. “Never outgrow your imagination.” - Teresa Mummert

48. “Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.” - Ray Bradbury

49. “Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us.” - Steven Redhead

50. “to understand pretending," Ombric was fond of saying, "is to conquer all barriers of time and space.” - William Joyce

51. “I didn't know the value of creation until I did it. Once I tasted imagination, I knew that I was trapped. I knew that I could never look back. At this point in my life, reality simply isn't enough for me. Dreams simply aren't enough for me. I need something more. I need to live in imagination. I need to become imagination.” - Lionel Suggs

52. “When you become the image of your own imagination, it's the most powerful thing you could ever do.” - Rupaul

53. “All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words.” - George MacDonald

54. “The mind is a universe, and it has the power to completely create any possibility.” - Lionel Suggs

55. “Dreamer in Exile.” - Teresa Medeiros

56. “The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite. Unable to enlarge the one, let us restrict the other, for it is from the difference between the two alone that are born all the pains which make us truly unhappy.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau

57. “Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.” - Arundhati Roy

58. “When people go away they vanish, turn to nothing, stop being. They live only in memories, haunting the imagination.” - Dezső Kosztolányi

59. “Lead's erasing then vanishingBanished from whatever it is they're drinking and it's cleanedRunning from the pitcher as if it's her fantasy” - Criss Jami

60. “Imagination is thinking beyond language.” - Raheel Farooq

61. “Use your imagination," I tell my students these days, "or someone else is going to use it for you.” - Ronald Sukenick

62. “Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new film, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.” - Jim Jarmusch

63. “What would your shoes say about the things you do everyday?” - Sherley Mondesir-Prescott

64. “There is a brilliant novel in all of us. Some imagine it…others live it. Authors dwell in an auspicious life by having the ability to fuse the two.” - Carl Henegan

65. “The highway of human possibility extends on forever into unknown territories, which have not yet been imagined.” - Bryant McGill

66. “It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.” - Jostein Gaarder