“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”

He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.

Some men are like musical glasses; to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet.

What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if,when you awoke,you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

The age seems sore from excess of stimulation, just as a day or two after a thorough Debauch and long sustained Drinking-match a man feels all over like a Bruise.

As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.

Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.

The faults of great authors are generally excellences carried to an excess.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it – low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion – and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national.

My eyes make pictures when they are shut.

Of no agenor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.

Blest hour! It was a luxury–to be!

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

There is one art of which people should be masters – the art of reflection.

It is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.

We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble – all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure!

In my opinion, there is a huge lack of imaginative, unconventional music being created by artists today and what little there is, goes widely unappreciated by the masses

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates.

Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science.

People who get Nobel prizes aren’t necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work.