Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on What It Takes ‘To Move the Masses’)

“I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet's individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul,
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,
To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's breadth off
The dust of the actual.–ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.”— English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), “Aurora Leigh” (1856)

Quote of the Day (Ursula Le Guin, on Her Imagination)

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.”— American science-fiction author Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018), "The Creatures on My Mind" in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (1996)

Quote of the Day (Trevor Noah, on Books, the ‘Rocket Fuel’)

“If imagination is the rocket, then books are the rocket fuel. They supercharge the mind and help it see beyond what it can conceive on its own.”— South African actor, writer, producer, comedian, political commentator, and television host Trevor Noah, Into the Uncut Grass (2024)

The image accompanying this post, of Trevor Noah on Centre Stage during the opening night of Web Summit Qatar 2024 at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center in Doha, Qatar, was taken Feb. 26, 2024, by Stephen McCarthy/Web Summit Qatar via Sportsfile.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Nolan, on the Power of ‘What is Not Shown’ on Film)

“What’s most powerful in cinema is often what is not shown. You’re asking the audience to use their imaginations. It’s something that people who make horror movies completely understand, that less can be more.”—Oscar-winning British-American film director Christopher Nolan quoted by Robert Ito, “The Secret Weapon in ‘Oppenheimer,’” The New York Times, Feb. 11, 2024

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Rev. Lynn Casteel Harper, on Imagination and Solomon’s Wisdom)

“The visual arts, creative movement, music, touch, a place in the soul that is below the verbal and rational. The jaw loosens, the breath slows and the heart lifts when we sing. When our capacity falls, the exact things in Solomon’s wisdom endure — poetry, songs and nature. The human heart longs for the imaginative and the noble.”— Rev. Lynn Casteel Harper, minister of older adults, Riverside Church, New York City, quoted in Mary Lee Talbot, “Poetry, Music, Nature Are at Center of Divine Wisdom, Says Harper,” The Chautauquan Daily, Aug. 17, 2021

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Evil and Imagination)

“Evil…has every advantage but one—it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil…but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.” —English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “At the End of the Quest, Victory” (review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King), The New York Times, Jan. 22, 1956

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on Starved Imaginations in Her New York Childhood)

“I have often sighed, in looking back at my childhood, to think how pitiful a provision was made for the life of the imagination behind those uniform brownstone façades, and then have concluded that since, for reasons which escape us, the creative mind thrives best on a reduced diet, I probably had the fare best suited to me. But this is not to say that the average well-to-do New Yorker of my childhood was not starved for a sight of the high gods. Beauty, passion, and danger were automatically excluded from his life (for the men were almost as starved as the women); and the average human being deprived of air from the heights is likely to produce other lives equally starved—which was what happened in old New York, where the tepid sameness of the moral atmosphere resulted in a prolonged immaturity of mind."—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937), “A Little Girl’s New York,” Harper’s Magazine, March 1938

Quote of the Day (Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, on the ‘Power of the Human Imagination’)

“I am obsessed by the beauty and power of the human imagination. It's in science, it's in all art forms, it's in all the beautiful things humans create. And it's more powerful than guns or money or anything.”—American director-screenwriter Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Broken Flowers), quoted in Caryn James, “Influencers: Jim Jarmusch’s American Journey,” The Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2019

(Photograph of Jim Jarmusch taken May 19, 2005, by Alain Zirah.)

Quote of the Day (Ursula Le Guin, on the Imagination as a Means of Becoming Human)

“Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and the use, or nonuse, of all weapons depends on it, as with all tools and their uses.  The imagination is a fundamental way of thinking, an essential means of becoming and remaining human. It is a tool of the mind.”—Science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (2004)

Quote of the Day (Stanley Kunitz, on Summer and Desire)

“What makes the engine go?

 Desire, desire, desire.

 The longing for the dance

 stirs in the buried life.

 One season only,

and it's done.”— American poet Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006), “Touch Me,” from Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995)

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on Imagination as the ‘Beginning of Creation’)

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. ” — Playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Back to Methuselah (1921)

Quote of the Day (John Keats, on the ‘Holiness of the Heart’s Affections’)

“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination.”—British Romantic poet John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, Letter of November 22, 1817