Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

Conflict acting on intelligence creates imagination. Faced with conflict, creatures are forced to imagine what will happen, where the next threat will come from. If there has never been conflict, imagination never develops. Wits arise in answer to danger, to pain, to tragedy. No one ever got smarter eating easy apples.

Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don’t you think?

I have often pondered over the roles of knowledge or experience, on the one hand, and imagination or intuition, on the other, in the process of discovery. I believe that there is a certain fundamental conflict between the two, and knowledge, by advocating caution, tends to inhibit the flight of imagination. Therefore, a certain naiveté, unburdened by conventional wisdom, can sometimes be a positive asset.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

It's impossible to imagine in the past that we could sit here and meet (between Taiwan and Mainland China officials). We must have some imagination if (we want to) resolve some difficulties, not just for such a meeting, we should also have a bigger imagination for cross-strait future development.

Therefore the man of genius requires imagination, in order to see in things not what nature has actually formed, but what she endeavoured to form, yet did not bring about, because of the conflict of her forms with one another

Every one who has seriously investigated a novel question, who has really interrogated Nature with a view to a distinct answer, will bear me out in saying that it requires intense and sustained effort of imagination. The relations of sequence among the phenomena must be seen; they are hidden; they can only be seen mentally; a thousand suggestions rise before the mind, but they are recognised as old suggestions, or as inadequate to reveal what is sought; the experiments by which the problem may be solved have to be imagined; and to imagine a good experiment is as difficult as to invent a good fable, for we must have distinctly present — clear mental vision — the known qualities and relations of all the objects, and must see what will be the effect of introducing some new qualifying agent. If any one thinks this is easy, let him try it: the trial will teach him a lesson respecting the methods of intellectual activity not without its use.

The mere act of dreaming is a vitalizing, life-affirming endeavor. As it turns out, using your imagination is very, very good for your wellbeing. Einstein believed that imagination was even more important than knowledge itself.

We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.

Is my imagination as important as reality? Sometimes I think YES... It's imagination that makes reality tolerable... Sometimes, I just want to close my eyes and fall in to the endless imagination...

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.