Imaginative Quotes - Page 17

• Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.

  Karen Armstrong

  Art, Effort, Creative

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• The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith.

  William Saroyan

  Children, Race, Healthy

  William Saroyan (1968). “My heart's in the Highlands”

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• Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction.

  David Brin

  Character, Doe, Fiction

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• Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Children, Men, Soul

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• Life's so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Dramabegins where there's freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Reality, Choices

  Aldous Huxley (1955). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• ... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Truth, Years, Two

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• Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.

  Walter Pater

  Eye, Creativity, Exercise

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• The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.

  Walter Pater

  Creativity, Exercise, Imagination

  Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance”, p.113, Simon and Schuster

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• An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

  Samuel Beckett

  Art, Adventure, Imagination

  Samuel Beckett, Ruby Cohn (1983). “Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment”, Calder Publications Limited

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• It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Men, Discovery

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• It is characteristic of the barbarian ... to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Mean, Men, Giving

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• It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason--that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved.

  Cecil Day-Lewis

  Exercise, Science, Discovery

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• Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Memories, Wind, Illusion

  Cynthia Ozick (1996). “Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character: And Other Essays on Writing”

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• Imaginative compassion for that which is other than myself is a constant artistic and ethical discipline.

  Shaun McNiff

  Compassion, Discipline, Artistic

  Shaun McNiff (1992). “Art as Medicine”, p.41, Shambhala Publications

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• Of all the hot liquors, I regard buttered rum as the worst. I believe that the drinking of it should be permitted only in the "Northwest Passage" and, even there, only by highly imaginative and overenthusiastic novelists.

  David A. Embury

  Drinking, Believe, Novelists

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• How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

  Isaac Asimov

  Art, Two, People

  "The Roving Mind". Book by Isaac Asimov. Chapter 25, 1983.

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• I guess I've done a couple of boys-y movies and on the whole you get bracketed into things you've just done, so it was an imaginative surprise from my Disney family to pull me out of the hat, as it were in Cinderella.

  Kenneth Branagh

  Couple, Boys, Done

  "Kenneth Branagh Talks Updating ‘Cinderella’ and Working With Disney". Interview with Kara Warner, screenrant.com. March 12, 2015.

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• You know, and I know, the cause of this accident. It is due to the adventurous, pioneering spirit of our race. It has been like in the past, it is like that in the present, and I hope it will be in the future. Here is a great imaginative project, to build a machine with twice the speed and twice the height of any existing machine in the world. We all went into it with our eyes wide open. We were conscious of the dangers that were lurking in the unknown. We did not know what fate was going to hold out for us in the future.

  John Moore-Brabazon, 1st Baron Brabazon of Tara

  Eye, Fate, Past

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• My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.

  James Arthur

  Beautiful, Dad, Believe

  "Poetry As a Way of Thinking: An Interview with James Arthur". Interview with Emilia Phillips, www.32poems.com.

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• I like stories that exist both in the naturalistic world and in our imaginative lives, films are so immersive in that sense, we can explore how our characters think and dream, as well as how they exist in the real world.

  Dave McKean

  Dream, Real, Character

  Source: theculturalgutter.com

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• And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.

  Stephen King

  Dream, Nuts, People

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• A culture is as rich and as capable of surviving as it has imaginative artists, skilled men of science, a high ethic level, workable government, land and natural resources, in about that order of importance.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Men, Artist, Land

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• I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

  Alan Lightman

  Writing, Our World, Long

  ""Mr g," by Alan Lightman". Interview with Jeff Glor, www.cbsnews.com. January 24, 2012.

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• They [the Hardscrabbles]never enjoyed it when adults playfully lied to them. The adults always think they're being amusing and imaginative, just like children. But kids never lie playfully. They lie as if their lives depended on it.

  Ellen Potter

  Children, Lying, Kids

  Ellen Potter (2010). “The Kneebone Boy”, p.81, Macmillan

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• After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.

  Jasper Fforde

  Summer, Reading, Healing

  Jasper Fforde (2004). “The Well of Lost Plots: A Thursday Next Novel”, p.51, Penguin

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