One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision.
Imagination tends to be truly useful if accompanied by the power of mental control - if the worlds in one's head can be purposefully manipulated and distinguished from the real one outside it.
the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.
Man's most valuable faculty is his imagination.
Maybe when all was said and done, the imagination was the most powerful of all weapons. It was the imagination of the human race that had allowed it to dream of a life beyond cold caves and of a possible future in the stars.
Shakespeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet.
Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.
Imagination is the most marvelous, miraculous, inconceivably powerful force the world has ever known.
The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-he awoke and found it truth.
Imagination is a concentrated extract of all the forces of life.
I would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his Author's hands; be pleased, he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.
Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.
In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.
This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.
I've spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that's only the starting point.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's places. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.
My character Jack in the New York Spring Spectacular is a lot of fun. He's playful, he's full of life. He can make things come to life. He can make things happen.
Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact.
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.
You create your own universe as you go along. The stronger your imagination, the more variegated your universe. When you leave off dreaming, the universe ceases to exist.
Genius, particularly creative genius, is less about raw intelligence and more about elevated vision.
Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.
