Human Imagination Quotes - Page 3

• The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

  James Joyce

  God, Art, Imagination

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ch. 5 (1916).

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• Our minds can go no further. The human imagination is capable of no further expression of beauty than the carved owl of Athene, the archaic, marble serpent, the arrogant selfish head of the Acropolis Apollo.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Beauty, Selfish, Expression

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.327, New Directions Publishing

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• Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Imagination, Figments, Equilibrium

  Kenneth E. Boulding (1985). “Collected Papers: Toward the Twenty-First Century : Political Economy, Social Systems, and World Peace”, University Press of Colorado

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• There are things that are more important than the news and what’s happening today. There are these archetypes which are part of the human imagination since humans were presumably imaginative. And I think that’s what [people] find touching, these eternal ideas. It’s one of the things that makes fantasy something that tends to stand the test of time because we’re reading, 50 years later, The Lord of the Rings.

  Clive Barker

  Reading, Thinking, Ideas

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• The last adventure left on this planet is creativity because we've been everywhere. There's not much left to explore. But there's a lot of exploration left in the human imagination.

  Wim Wenders

  Creativity, Adventure, Imagination

  "Director Wim Wenders PINA Interview". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. December 21, 2011.

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• We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Men, Civilization, Imagination

  Jacob Bronowski (1976). “The ascent of man”

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• Let me define a garden as the meeting of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is time and temporality.

  Thomas Moore

  Beauty, Time, Garden

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• The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.

  Dean Koontz

  Dream, Struggle, Heart

  Dean Koontz (2007). “The Taking: A Novel”, p.143, Bantam

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• The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.

  Terence McKenna

  Imagination, World, Body

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• I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.

  Philip Larkin

  Spiritual, Thinking, Odds

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• Everything will come true in cyberspace. That's the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it's simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.

  Terence McKenna

  Ideas, Imagination, Cyberspace

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• After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.

  Sigmund Freud

  Symbolism, Imagination, Age

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• Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it 'Her'. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Religious, Hero, Airplane

  Andrea Dworkin (1989). “Pornography: men possessing women”, Plume

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• Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.

  Christian Wiman

  Spiritual, Mean, Imagination

  Christian Wiman (2013). “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer”, p.51, Macmillan

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• I rest not from my great task! | 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

  Eye, Men, Imagination

  William Blake (2008). “The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake”, p.147, Univ of California Press

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• On the human imagination events produce the effects of time.

  James F. Cooper

  Time, Imagination, Events

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• On the human imagination, events produce the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled far and seen much, is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents, soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.

  James F. Cooper

  Time, Long, Imagination

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• The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

  Barry Lopez

  Powerful, Imagination, Influence

  Barry Lopez (2016). “Of Wolves and Men”, p.11, Open Road Media

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• How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

  Toni Morrison

  Imagination, Wish, Trying

  Toni Morrison (1998). “Paradise”, Knopf

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• ... Art is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

  Daniel Bell

  Art, Exercise, Imagination

  Daniel Bell (1991). “The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and Journeys”, p.20, Transaction Publishers

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• What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.

  Terence McKenna

  Believe, Imagination, Expansion

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• The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.

  Terence McKenna

  Technology, Safety, Imagination

  Terence McKenna (1998). “True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival”, M J F Books

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• The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.

  Douglas Adams

  Distance, Simple, Imagination

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, p.51, Pan Macmillan

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• Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to its shimmering red presence in the clear night sky. It is like a glowing ember in a field of ethereal lights, projecting energy and promise. It inspires visions of an approachable world. The mind vaults to thoughts of what might have been (if Mars were a litter closer to the warming Sun) and of what could be (if humans were one day to plant colonies there).

  John Noble Wilford

  Eye, Night, Light

  John Noble Wilford (1991). “Mars Beckons: The Mysteries, the Challenges, the Expectations of Our Next Great Adventure in Space”, Vintage

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• One of the wonderful aspects of the human imagination is its power to break through the barriers of time and space. It can see things not as they are but as the can be.

  Denis Waitley

  Break Through, Space, Imagination

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