George Bernard Shaw Imagination Quotations

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire...

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

You see things and you say, Why? But I dream things that never were and say, Why not?

An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.

To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.

You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.

The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.