Ralph Waldo Emerson Imagination Quotations

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

The Sky is the daily bread of the imagination

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.

That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our life and character.

The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.

The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.

It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.

Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

There are no days in life that are so memorable as those that vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.

Imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,--familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe's rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.