Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
Jean-Paul Sartre
1. "Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within sleep."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Essays, Second Series"
Other categories: Life and Death
2. "Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it."
Jane Wagner
Other categories: Pain and Tears
3. "All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction."
Shirley Abbott
Other categories: Memory
4. "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
Other categories: Human
5. "The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people."
George Bernard Shaw
Other categories: Art and Culture
6. "Politics is the enemy of the imagination."
Ian McEwan
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
7. "Let us be realistic and demand the impossible."
graffito - Paris 1968
Other categories: Inscriptions etc.
8. "Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."
Thomas Berger
Other categories: Art and Culture
9. "Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."
John Lennon
10. "[...] parables are unnecessary for recognizing the blatant absurdity of everyday life. Reality is lesson enough."
Jane O?Reilly, "The Girl I Left Behind"
Other categories: Life and Death
11. "A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
Jane Austen, "Pride and Prejudice"
Other categories: Love -:- Woman and Man
12. "I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books."
Jean Rostand, "The Substance of Man"
13. "It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations."
Walter Bagehot, "The English Constitution"
Other categories: Power and Weakness
14. "Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels."
Luigi Pirandello, "Six Characters in Search of an Author"
Other categories: Nature and Animals
15. "Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be — like the reality of yesterday — an illusion tomorrow."
Luigi Pirandello, "Six Characters in Search of an Author"
Other categories: Time and Passing
16. "When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit."
Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity -:- Question and Problem
17. "Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense."
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Love
18. "Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator."
George Santayana, "The Life of Reason"
Other categories: Various
19. "Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."
Tom Stoppard
Other categories: Art and Culture
20. "Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts."
Brian W. Aldiss
Other categories: Art and Culture
21. "Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine."
Louis Aragon
22. "It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand. "
André Dubus
Other categories: Time and Passing -:- Various
23. "Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality."
Jules de Gaultier
24. "There?s a 50 percent chance of anything - either it happens or it doesn?t."
Michael R. Barnes
Other categories: Question and Problem
25. "Knowledge is consciousness of reality. Reality is the sum of the laws that govern nature and of the causes from which they flow."
Egyptian proverb, (from ancient temple)
Other categories: Nature and Animals -:- Knowledge, Ignorance
26. "[Statistics] Fiction in its most uninteresting form."
Evan Esar, "Esar's Comic Dictionary"
Other categories: Science and Technology
27. "We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human."
Jacquelyn Small
Other categories: Human
28. "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
Douglas Adams
Other categories: Various
29. "A thousand probabilities does not make one fact."
Italian proverb
30. "Spirituality is basically our relationship with reality."
Chandra Patel
31. "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler."
Henry David Thoreau
Other categories: Dreams and Desires
32. "Images are nearer reality than cold definitions."
Egyptian proverb, (from ancient temple)
33. "Become the change you want to see."
Oprah Winfrey
Other categories: Dreams and Desires
34. "The imagination is one of the forces of nature."
Wallace Stevens
Other categories: Nature and Animals
35. "Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us."
Paul Theroux
Other categories: Destiny and Fate
36. "Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them."
Laurette Taylor
Other categories: Beauty and Ugliness
37. "Poetry is the deification of reality."
Edith Sitwell
Other categories: Art and Culture
38. "This world is but canvas to our imaginations."
Henry David Thoreau
39. "The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality."
James A. Michener
Other categories: Dreams and Desires -:- Life and Death
40. "The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths."
Aleksandr Pushkin
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
41. "My first line of defense against reality is called sleep."
Ashleigh Brilliant
42. "Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
Stephen King
Other categories: Truth and Falsity
43. "Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't; and a sense of humour to console him for what he is."
Horace Walpole
Other categories: Wit and Humor
44. "Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality."
Albert Einstein
Other categories: Science and Technology
45. "Reality is for people who lack imagination."
(?)
46. "Love is when you don't want to go to sleep because reality is better than a dream."
(?)
Other categories: Dreams and Desires -:- Love
47. "Imagination is intelligence having fun."
George Scialabba
Other categories: Intellect, Judgement
48. "Reality is that part of the imagination we all agree on."
(?)
49. "Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future."
Charles F. Kettering
Other categories: Time and Passing
50. "Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom."
Jean-Paul Sartre, "Imagination: A Psychological Critique"
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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