My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

I am supposed to be an utter fool and the more I read the more of a fool they think me.

Why do I have this imagination? It's the only one I've got!

It is, after all, our imagination that makes us human. Vincent van Gogh asked, “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” To which the answer is, I would have thought, boring, bordering on pointless.

The clothes you're wearing, the room, the house, the city that you're in. Everything in it started out in the human imagination. Your lives, your personalities, your whole world. All invented. All made up. All the wars, the romances. The masterpieces and the machines. And there's nothing here but a funny little twist of amino acids, playing a marvelous game of pretend.

I believe my own imagination.

It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it.

I fear, Master Zamp, that you are a victim to your own perfervid imagination.

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.

Imagination has been the companion of my whole existence – lively, swift, restless, at times timid and balky, most often ready to devour plain upon plain in its course.

An imagination is a brain with wings. Guided by a hand that holds a pen or a voice that directs its dream, it has accomplished all the good that the world is heir to. Imagination soars above the wrongs of the world and things that are, to things that ought to be, and nothing can stop it, till its message is heard. Imagination sees an Atlantic cable and does not rest till it is a fact. Imagination sees a Republic and does not rest till the throne falls and the better order takes its place. Imagination sees a world where "common" humanity shares in the right of suffrage, and it comes to pass. Imagination sees a world without poverty, where the producer owns the means of production and distribution, and, as in all ages, the "practical mind" says "it can't be done." But it has been written and the man with the ballot is beginning to see.