Quotes to inspire and reflect

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

The instant / trivial as it is / is all we have / unless—unless / things the imagination feeds upon, / the scent of the rose, / startle us anew.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.

Such tricks hath strong imagination, / That, if it would but apprehend some joy, / It comprehends some bringer of that joy; / Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

In the world of the imagination, anything goes that’s imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Imagination, that dost so abstract us / That we are not aware, not even when / A thousand trumpets sound about our ears!

Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.

A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the ram- bow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.

Imagination, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

Somewhere along the line I knew there d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

We wake from one dream into another dream.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns.

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea.

He who would be cured of ignorance must confess it.

He that knows least commonly presumes most.

He that knows little often repeats it.

The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide.

all ignorance toboggans into know / and trudges up to ignorance again.

Ignorance is always ready to admire itself, / Procure yourself critical friends.

Wisdom is prevented by ignorance, and delusion is the result.

A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

Idleness was a sin not against the self or against God but against Mammon and Pierce & Pierce.

If a soldier or labourer complain of the hardship of his lot, set him to do nothing.

I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.

Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments.

Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.

But sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them—their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.

Expect poison from the standing water.

This wasted time I have found by constant experience to be as indispensable as sleep. It cannot be employed in reading, nor even in thinking upon any serious subject. It must be wasted on trifles—doing nothing. The string of the bow must be slackened, and the bow itself laid aside.

We are now again in an epoch of wars of religion, but a religion is now called an “ideology.”.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.

At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We’re all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

While you cannot resolve what you are, at last you will be nothing.

[Philosophy] forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.