Imaginary Quotes - Page 10

• Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.

  Marquis de Sade

  Medicine, Mistress, Needs

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• Only in imaginary experience (in the folk tale, for example), which neutralizes the sense of social realities, does the social world take the form of a universe of possibles equally possible for any possible subject.

  Pierre Bourdieu

  Reality, Example, Doe

  Pierre Bourdieu (1990). “The Logic of Practice”, p.64, Stanford University Press

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• Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

  Alain Badiou

  Art, Real, Reflection

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• Shake off those gloomy feelings. Drive them away. Fix your mind and pleasures upon what is before you.All is bright if you will think it so. All is happy if you will make it so. Do not dream. It is too ideal, too imaginary. Dreaming by day, I mean. Live in the world you inhabit. Look upon things as they are. Take them as you find them. Make the best of them. Turn them to your advantage.

  Robert E. Lee

  Dream, Mean, Thinking

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• True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love.

  Raymond Queneau

  Stories, Hunger, True Story

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• Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.

  George Eliot

  Self Confidence, People, Addresses

  George Eliot (2015). “Daniel Deronda”, p.46, Booklassic

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• Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't. But you can't tell the difference when you have no real information. Fear can create even more imaginary obstacles than ignorance can. That's why the smallest step away from speculation and into reality can be an amazing relief...The Reality Solution means: Do it before you're ready.

  Barbara Sher

  Courage, Real, Ignorance

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• It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.

  Nicola Chiaromonte

  Real, Fiction, Dimensions

  Nicola Chiaromonte (1985). “The paradox of history: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Pasternak, and others”, Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

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• Krzhizhanovsky wanted to perform imaginary experiments with the nature of time and space. Outside, in the streets, the Communist state was busy performing such experiments for real. In response, Krzhizhanovsky's prose has a recklessly unstable tone in which delighted examination of impossible worlds can slip into ferocious political sarcasm.... It is a method for investigating how much unreality reality can bear.

  Adam Thirlwell

  Real, Sarcasm, Space

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• Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.

  Manuel Puig

  Reality, Hands, Doe

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• Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Reality, Opposites, Giving

  "America" by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Chris Turner, (p. 95), 1988.

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• Because we can't comprehend it, and that's what allows us to do it again. And it is the normal, it's the average person that can do this. Again, in an imaginary other universe, maybe we'd have done it. That's the terrible truth that lies at the heart of each of us; that imponderable, 'were I not Jewish, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, would I have gone down on the other side?'

  Bob Geldof

  Lying, Heart, Average

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• Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Numbers, Unity, Amphibians

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• Be strong then, and enter into your own body; there you have a solid place for your feet. Think about it carefully! Don't go off somewhere else! ...just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things, and stand firm in that which you are.

  Kabir

  Life, Strong, Thinking

  Kabir (1977). “The Kabir book: forty-four of the ecstatic poems of Kabir”

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• When you see a struggle that you may be having personally put on a big screen and in a roomful of people, then it makes you feel less crazy or alone, because you're seeing that other people are dealing with it too. You get to see in this imaginary scenario how people might try and answer some questions or deal with some problems.

  Michael Shannon

  Crazy, Struggle, People

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• You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Lying, Reality, Interesting

  Jorge Luis Borges, Anthony Kerrigan (1968). “A Personal Anthology”, p.2, Grove Press

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• I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have.

  Ken Follett

  Real, Character, Historical

  Interview with Ann Bruns, www.bookreporter.com. December 15, 2000.

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• Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.

  Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Journey

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• To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.

  Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Pain, Journey, Imagination

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• Most persons are so absorbed in the contemplation of the outside world that they are wholly oblivious to what is passing on within themselves. The premature death of millions is primarily traceable to this cause. Even among those who exercise care, it is a common mistake to avoid imaginary, and ignore the real dangers. And what is true of an individual also applies, more or less, to a people as a whole.

  Nikola Tesla

  Real, Mistake, Exercise

  Nikola Tesla (2014). “My Inventions Nikola Tesla's Autobiography”, p.10, Lulu.com

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• Biking through New York's boroughs in 2005, I thought about some old friends, Joe and Eileen Bailey. Though they are imaginary, I frequently talk to them.

  Charles Schumer

  New York, Old Friends, Biking

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• Since most problems are created by our imagination and are thus imaginary, all we need are imaginary solutions.

  Richard Bandler

  Imagination, Needs, Problem

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• Every day there comes a moment when a person lays his hands in his lap and all his busyness collapses like ashes. The work accomplished is, from the soul's point of view, entirely imaginary.

  Robert Musil

  Views, Hands, Soul

  Robert Musil, Burton Pike, David S. Luft (1995). “Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses”, p.153, University of Chicago Press

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• I am glad to have found a readership, but one can’t write only what is likely to sell. A writer is not a shopkeeper. A writer creates an imaginary world that he transmits to others.

  Tahar Ben Jelloun

  Writing, World, Found

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• I wish to put together an imaginary nation. It is my belief that no other nation is possible, or rather, I believe that authors who count take responsibility for a map which is addressed to travellers of the earth, the world, and the spirit. Each issue is composed as a map of this land and this glory, images of our cities and of our politics must join our poetry. I want a nation in which discourse is active and scholarship is understood as it should be, the mode of our understanding and the ground of our derivations.
  -Robin Blaser (June 3, 1967)

  Robin Blaser

  Believe, Responsibility, Issues

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