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1 " If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in. "
― Frederick Buechner , Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary
2 " Is a figment of our imagination actually reality coming to life? "
3 " Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change. "
― Paul Rogat Loeb , The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear
4 " When scorching passion only leaves ashes of unfulfilled dreams, hope may entice the sprinkling magic of our imagination into livening up the footlights on a new stage of life. (" Taken for a ride" ) "
5 " In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby. "
― Parul Wadhwa , The Masquerade
6 " But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine. "
― Marcel Proust
7 " Since God lives in the heart, I was not to seek some Being way up in the sky . . . my journey to God was not outward, but inward! The only way to get closer to God was to become ordered enough inside to enable me to experience him within. When our emotions are running loose, and our minds are confused . . . and our imagination is working overtime, there's so much internal noise that we can't hear the still voice of God.So many times over my years as a mother I had felt tired, overwhelmed, and worn out So often I felt I couldn't get any personal space to think, what with the continual onslaught of " Mummy! Mummy!" coming from the children, or the work that I hadn't finished staring me in the face. I needed quiet time alone. "
8 " We’ve made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We’ve fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We’ve lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being. It is the elemental experience we all desire and seek, most of our days, to give and receive. The sliver of love’s potential that the Greeks separated out as eros is where we load so much of our desire, center so much of our imagination about delight and despair, define so much of our sense of completion. There is the love the Greeks called filia—the love of friendship. There is the love they called agape—love as embodied compassion, expressions of kindness that might be given to a neighbor or a stranger. The Metta of the root Buddhist Pali tongue, “lovingkindness,” carries the nuance of benevolent, active interest in others known and unknown, and its cultivation begins with compassion towards oneself. "
― , Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
9 " Be bold. Find the courage to dream lofty dreams of what you wish to attain. Dream big and wide. Dreaming is healthy for our imagination to explore the unknown. Before our goals can materialize, a dream must be set in motion, it must feed our soul (subconscious) a belief that exists in the unknown future. "
― Machel Shull , Happy Soul: 10 Steps to Happiness
10 " If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams. "
― Yann Martel , Life of Pi
11 " From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility. "
― Mario Vargas Llosa
12 " We should use our imagination more than our memory. "
― Shimon Peres
13 " 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. "
― Bessel van der Kolk , The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
14 " If we don’t manage to connect the dots anymore and the power of our imagination is creaking at the seams, in a world of withering expectations, we have to rewrite the script of our life. (" Into a new life" ) "
15 " Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear.We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it? "
― Leonard Mlodinow , The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
16 " We can build anything in our imagination that's where all creation begins in your life "
17 " We look back on our life as a thing of broken pieces, because our mistakes and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have accomplished and attained. "
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Maxims and Reflections
18 " Sometimes our worst fears aren't realized - though in my experience it's only to make room for the fears our imagination was insufficient to house. "
― Mark Lawrence , Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War, #1)
19 " The sea refreshes our imagination because it does not make us think of human life; yet it rejoices the soul, because, like the soul, it is an infinite and impotent striving, a strength that is ceaselessly broken by falls, an eternal and exquisite lament. The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. Sweeping up with the waves of those movements, plunging back with them, the heart thus forgets its own failures and finds solace in an intimate harmony between its own sadness and the sea’s sadness, which merges the sea’s destiny with the destinies of all things. "
― Marcel Proust , The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust
20 " When ideas evaporate, when shapes fade and forms lose their integrity, our imagination can create an outlandish setting and convert everything into a hazy, misty Turner landscape. (" Back garden of a dream" ) "