“Nothing limits achievement like small thinking; nothing expands possibilities like unleashed imagination.”- William Arthur Ward
One of the major difference between we humans and other primates is the ability to use our imagination to create innovative products, execute on great ideas and bring to life what we imagined. As the popular saying goes whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.
We humans are the only mammals that can see things before they happen, we can imagine things before they happen. You can not take people farther than you have gone, your imagination is a preview of things to come.
In her very inspiring 2008 Harvard University Commencement speech, Author J.K.Rowling spoke about the power of imagination:
Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
Here are some great quotes on the Power of Imagination:
- “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” ―Albert Einstein
- “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” ―Mark Twain
- “You have all the reason in the world to achieve your grandest dreams. Imagination plus innovation equals realization.” ―Denis Waitley
- “We are more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” – Seneca
- “The man who has no imagination has no wings.”– Muhammad Ali
- “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.”– William Arthur Ward
- “Live out of your imagination, not your history.” – Stephen R. Covey
- “Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” – Gloria Steinem
- “Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.” – William Stevens
- “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, and live the life you have imagined.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not – and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation – in its’ arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.” – J.K. Rowling
- “Nothing limits achievement like small thinking; nothing expands possibilities like unleashed imagination.”- William Arthur Ward
- “Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.”– Maria Montessorij
- “Let your imagination release your imprisoned possibilities.” Robert H. Schuller
- “All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination. Imagination is the workshop of your mind, capable of turning mind energy into accomplishment and wealth.” – Napoleon Hill
- “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” – Mark Twain
- “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – T.E. Lawrence
- “Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.” W. Somerset Maugham
- “Commitment unlocks the doors of imagination, allows vision, and gives us the ‘right stuff’ to turn our dreams into reality.” – James Womack
- “All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.”–Brian Tracy
- “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
- “It is important to remember that we all have magic inside us.” –J. K. Rowling
- “You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration”. – James Allen
- “Everything you can imagine is real.” -Pablo Picasso
- “Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, and dreams are forever.” -Walt Disney
- “Every human has four endowments – self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom…The power to choose, to respond, to change.” -Stephen Covey
- “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” -Henry David Thoreau,
- “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” -Jules de GaultierLive out of your imagination, not your history.
- “Live out of your imagination, not your history.” – Stephen Covey
- “Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. It enables us to reply to the common wisdom that we cannot soar by saying, just watch!” – Bill Bradley
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