Sunday, September 2, 2012 – Imaginary Beings
There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. ~ H. L. Mencken
Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them. ~ John Ruskin
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise. ~ Simone Weil
If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I’d have fewer imaginary ones. ~ Don Herold
I was the kid next door’s imaginary friend. ~ Emo Philips
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them. ~ Emile M. Cioran
Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults. ~ Thomas Szasz
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. ~ Marianne Moore
I am putting real plums into an imaginary cake. ~ Mary McCarthy
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future. ~ Jean Baudrillard
Imaginary evils are incurable. ~ Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real. ~ Federico Fellini
Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist. ~ Edward W. Howe
It is a queer thing, but imaginary troubles are harder to bear than actual ones. ~ Dorothy Dix
If something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn’t there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That’s why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones. ~ Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
The imaginary is what tends to become real. ~ André Breton
The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot. ~ André Breton
As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency. ~ Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology
A long time ago people believed that the world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. Some still do, to this day. The man on the moon is looking down and laughing. ~ Vera Nazarian
Actors speak of things imaginary as if they were real, while your preachers too often speak of things real as if they were imaginary. ~ Thomas Betterton
Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run. ~ George Bernard Shaw
People who have realized that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations. ~ Alexander Herzen
PAST, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one – the knowledge and the dream. ~ Ambrose Bierce
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. ~ Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination. ~ Mark Twain
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. ~ Francis Bacon
I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
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
Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun. ~ George Scialabba
The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language. Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word.” ~ Alan Moore
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast ~ Lewis Carroll
And who cares for imagination? Who does not think it a rather dangerous, senseless attribute, akin to weakness, perhaps partaking of frenzy – a disease rather than a gift of the mind? Probably all think it so but those who possess, or fancy they possess it. To hear them speak, you would believe that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them, that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision, that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter, which you do not feel. All illusion, of course; but the fanatics cling to their dream, and would not give it for gold. ~ Charlotte Brontë
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. ~ G. K. Chesterton
Just Above Sunset 