Top 100 Imagination Quotes From All The Greatest Thinkers And Dreamers

Moumita Dutta
Dec 12, 2023 By Moumita Dutta
Originally Published on Feb 06, 2021
Edited by Jacob Fitzbright
An Artist holding a mastekhin smeared in oil paint and painting Van Gogh's starry night replica.
Age: 0-99
Read time: 11.4 Min

The importance of imagination quotes shouldn't be taken lightly.

Imagination can be best understood through the power of imagination quotes. These quotes will always ask you to use your imagination.

Quotes on imagination include many genres, for example, love and imagination quotes, reading and imagination quotes, funny imagination quotes, beyond imagination quotes. Inspirational quotes about imaginations are read all over the world and have the power to help in difficult situations in your life, for as the saying goes "imagination is more important than knowledge!" So, without much delay, let us go into these handpicked imagination quotes.

For more quotes, take a look at [dance quotes] and craft quotes.

Short Famous Imagination Quotes

A boy with helmets and lights representing inventors

Scroll down to take a look at well-known imagination quotes. These include imagination quotes by Walt Disney and other inspirational quotes.

1. "Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, and dreams are forever."

– Walt Disney

2. "You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."

- Mark Twain.

3. "Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."

- George Bernard Shaw.

4. "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution."

- Albert Einstein.

5.  "The man who has no imagination has no wings."

- Muhammad Ali.

6. "The power of imagination created the illusion that my vision went much farther than the naked eye could actually see."

- Nelson Mandela.

7. "Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal... Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite."

- John Muir.

8. "Everything you can imagine is real."

- Pablo Picasso.

9. “Imagination is the true magic carpet.”

- Norman Vincent Peale.

10. "Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."

- John Lennon.

11. "It is a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed."

- Mark Twain.

12. "Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow."

- William Blake.

13. "Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless."

- Jamie Paolinetti.

14. "Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."

- Oscar Wilde.

15. "Our imagination flies - we are its shadow on the earth."

- Vladimir Nabokov.

16. "If you can imagine it, you can achieve it, if you can dream it, you can become it!"

- William Arthur Ward.

17. "This world is but a canvas to our imagination."

- Henry David Thoreau.

18. "Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination."

- John Dewey.

19. "Imagination rules the world."

- Napoleon Bonaparte.

20. "Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create."

-Maria Montessori.

21. "Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything."

- Henry Miller.

22. "Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination."

- Oscar Wilde.

23. "What is now proved was once only imagined."

- William Blake.

24. "Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality."

- Lewis Carroll.

25. "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere."

- Carl Sagan.

Inspiring And Good Imagination Quotes

While knowledge is limited, imagination is the beginning of our creativity in life. Take a look at some of the most inspirational quotes on imagination. These also include 'my imagination' quotes!

26. "Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities."

- L. Frank Baum.

27. "The imagination is man's power over nature."

- Wallace Stevens.

28. "Live out of your imagination, not your history."

- Stephen Covey.

29. "Nothing limits achievement like small thinking; nothing expands possibilities like unleashed imagination."

- William Arthur Ward.

30.  "We are more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than from reality."

- Seneca.

31. "The best use of imagination is creativity. The worst use of imagination is anxiety."

- Deepak Chopra.

32. "Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."

- Terry Pratchett.

33. "He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet."

- Joseph Joubert.

34. "An idea is salvation by imagination."

- Frank Lloyd Wright.

35. "Imagination creates reality."

- Richard Wagner.

36. "Imagination should be the center of your life."

- Ray Bradbury.

37. "A book - a well-composed book - is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."

- Caroline Gordon.

38. "The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world."

- Malcolm Gladwell.

39. "The mightiest lever known to the moral world, imagination."

- William Wordsworth.

40. "What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination."

- Sylvia Plath.

41. "It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination."

- Henry David Thoreau.

42. "To bring anything into your life, imagine that it’s already there."

- Richard Bach.

43. "A book is a device to ignite the imagination."

- Alan Bennett.

44. "The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

- P. B. Shelley.

45. "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

- Jorge Luis Borges.

46. "Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."

- Oscar Wilde.

47. "I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge."

- Robert Fulghum.

48. "The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment."  

- Tony Robbins.

49. "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

- Thomas Edison.

Best Imagination Quotes

Here are some of the best collection of quotes about imagination that will surely help us relate with in life. The best imagination quote might be "Imagination is the highest kite one can fly" by Lauren Bacall.

50. "Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world."

- Walt Disney.

51. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact."

- William Shakespeare.

52. "Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model."

- Vincent Van Gogh.

53. "Imagination is the highest kite one can fly."

- Lauren Bacall.

54. "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which 'are' there."

- Richard P. Feynman.

55. "My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."

- Ursula K. Le Guin.

56. "Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them."

- Ralph W. Gerard.

57. "Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?"

- Lemmy Kilmister.

58. "Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything!"

- Henry Miller.

59. "My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk!"

- John Keats.

60. "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination."

- John Keats.

61. "Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future."

- Charles Kettering.

62. "Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored."

- Patricia A. McKillip.

63. "It is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it is irrepressible, unconfinable; that when the real world is shut out, it can create a world for itself..."

- Washington Irving.

64. "Imagination should be used, not to escape reality, but to create it."

- Colin Wilson.

65. "While the world of reality has its limits, the world of your imagination is without boundaries"

- Wayne Dyer.

66. "The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere."

- Terence McKenna.

67. "Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got."

- Philip José Farmer.

68. "Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life."

- Simone Weil.

69. "If you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything."

- Alice Walker.

70. "I have too much imagination to be a housewife."

- Marilyn Monroe.

Imagination Quotes For Kids

A child's imagination quotes and children's imagination quotes can be very influential in shaping their lives. These quotes also include childhood imagination quotes and kids imagination quotes to help parents and children alike.

71. "Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination."

- Walt Disney.

72. "The best way to enhance a child's imagination is to make them read."

- Ken Spillman.

73. "My children have been all over the world, and I think it's so good for them: expanding their horizons and imagination and seeing how other people live."

- Keeley Hawes.

74. "It is more important to let a child's imagination develop than it is to labor to inculcate in him or her some correct ethical point of view."

- Padraic Colum.

75. "Since childhood, I'd been suspected of imagination!"

- Steve Aylett.

76. "While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth."

- Charles Lamb.

77. "It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations..."

- Katherine Paterson.

78. "Children see magic because they look for it."

- Christopher Moore.

79. "When the arts are included, children's imaginations are allowed to run wild."

- T Bone Burnett.

80. "We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

- George Bernard Shaw.

81. "I spent my childhood in an imaginary world - probably because I needed an escape."

- Rickie Lee Jones.

82. "The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way."

- Joe Hill.

83. "Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us."

- J. B. Priestley.

84. "I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true."

- Sir Richard Dawkins.

85. "There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island."

- Walt Disney.

86. "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.

CS Lewis Imagination Quotes

The influential and loved fantasy author C. S. Lewis had many inspirational quotes about imagination. Take a look.

87. "For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."

- C. S. Lewis.

88. "As to old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling."

- C.S. Lewis.

89. "Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis.

90. "The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history."

- C. S. Lewis.

91. "The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys."

- C. S. Lewis.

92. “I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

- C.S. Lewis.

93. "If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination."

- C. S. Lewis.

94. "As long as I live, my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden."

- C. S. Lewis.

95. "Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition."

- C. S. Lewis.

Imagination Quotes By Albert Einstein

During his pioneering life, Albert Einstein was a strong believer in individual imagination. Albert Einstein imagination quotes are famous world-wide.

96. "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."

- Albert Einstein.

97. "To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science."

- Albert Einstein.

98. "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."

- Albert Einstein.

99. "Your imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions."

- Albert Einstein.

100. "In that way, imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the part of servants of the primary instincts."

- Albert Einstein.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for imagination quotes then why not take a look at [Albert Einstein quotes], or art quotes for kids.

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Written by Moumita Dutta

Bachelor of Arts specializing in Journalism and Mass Communication, Postgraduate Diploma in Sports Management

Moumita Dutta picture

Moumita DuttaBachelor of Arts specializing in Journalism and Mass Communication, Postgraduate Diploma in Sports Management

A content writer and editor with a passion for sports, Moumita has honed her skills in producing compelling match reports and stories about sporting heroes. She holds a degree in Journalism and Mass Communication from the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management, Calcutta University, alongside a postgraduate diploma in Sports Management.

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