Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

John Abercrombie

The sound and proper exercise of the imagination may be made to contribute to the cultivation of all that is virtuous and estimable in the human character.

Character | Cultivation | Imagination | Sound |

William Blake

The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation, of vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.

Body | Character | Death | Eternal | Eternity | Imagination | Nature | World |

François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

There is no more dangerous illusion than the fancies by which people try to avoid illusion. It is imagination which leads us astray; and the certainty which we seek through imagination, feeling, and taste, is one of the most dangerous sources from which fanaticism springs.

Character | Fanaticism | Illusion | Imagination | People | Taste |

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Mortifications have their reward in a state of consciousness that corresponds, on a lower level, to spiritual beatitude. The artist - and the philosopher and the man of science are also artists - knows the bliss of aesthetic contemplation, discovery and non-attached possession. The goods of the intellect, the emotions and the imagination are real goods; but they are not the final good, and when we treat them as ends in themselves, we fall into idolatry. Mortification of will, desire and action is not enough; there must also be mortification in the fields of knowing, thinking feeling and fancying.

Action | Aesthetic | Character | Consciousness | Contemplation | Desire | Discovery | Emotions | Ends | Enough | Good | Imagination | Knowing | Man | Reward | Science | Thinking | Will | Discovery |

Washington Irving

He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.

Character | Heart | Imagination |

Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ

No man should think that peace comes easily. Peace does not come by merely wanting it, or shouting for it, or marching down Main Street for it. Peace is built brick by brick, mortared by the stubborn effort and the total energy and imagination of able and dedicated men. And it is built in the living faith that, in the end, man can and will master his own destiny.

Character | Destiny | Effort | Energy | Faith | Imagination | Man | Men | Peace | Will | Wisdom | Think |

James Russell Lowell

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

Character | Imagination | Society | Solitude | Society |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

Who are happy in marriage? Those with so little imagination that they cannot picture a better state, and those so shrewd that they prefer quiet slavery to hopeless rebellion.

Better | Character | Happy | Imagination | Little | Marriage | Quiet | Rebellion | Slavery |

Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

A strong imagination begetteth opportunity, say the wise men.

Character | Imagination | Men | Opportunity | Wise |

Madame de Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné

Gloom and sadness are poison to us, the origin of hysterics, which is a disease of the imagination caused by vexation, and supported by fear.

Character | Disease | Fear | Gloom | Imagination | Sadness |

William Cullen Bryant

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

Art | Imagination | Poetry | Thought | Wisdom | Art | Thought |

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

The imagination acquires by custom a certain involuntary, unconscious power of observation and comparison, correcting its own mistakes and arriving at precision of judgment, just as the outward eye is disciplined to compare, adjust, estimate, measure, the objects reflected on the back of its retina. The imagination is but the faculty of glassing images; and it is with exceeding difficulty, and by the imperative will of the reasoning faculty resolved to mislead it, that it glasses images which have no prototype in truth and nature.

Custom | Difficulty | Imagination | Judgment | Nature | Observation | Power | Precision | Truth | Will | Wisdom | Precision |

Philip Conley, fully Philip Mallory "Phil" Conley

Your imagination has much to do with your life. It pictures beauty, success, desired results. One the other hand, it brings into focus ugliness, distress, and failure. It is for you to decide how you want your imagination to serve you.

Beauty | Distress | Failure | Focus | Imagination | Life | Life | Success | Wisdom |

Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

It is good... to try in imagination to give to any one species an advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do. This ought to convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction as necessary as it is difficult to acquire. All that we can do, is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ration; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

Belief | Death | Fear | Good | Happy | Ignorance | Imagination | Life | Life | Mind | Nature | Organic | Struggle | War | Wisdom |

Anne Dillard

A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world - if only from time to time.

Ignorance | Imagination | Mind | Reason | Time | Wisdom | World |