As a bookish child in Calcutta I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.

To think the world therefore a general Bedlam or place of madmen and oneself a physician is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination and the way to happiness.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.

Happiness is ideal it is the work of the imagination.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness second their imagination and third their industry.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth but it's only money... they don't know how to enjoy it because they have no imagination.

There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence imagination and wonder.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.

A good teacher can inspire hope ignite the imagination and instill a love of learning.

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

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

My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.

One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals. If a garden is a site for the imagination how can we be very far from the beginning?

The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text. With the impact of the iPad and the future of the book being up for re-imagination I wonder whether we'll rediscover the importance of making texts richer visually.

You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.

Clearly some creative thinking is badly needed if humans are to have a future beyond Earth. Returning to the Moon may be worthy and attainable but it fails to capture the public's imagination. What does get people excited is the prospect of a mission to Mars.

There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now the story of Keats can redeem them in their fantasy or imagination in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

We are all afraid for our confidence for the future for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man every civilization has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.

In rising financial markets the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present but only for the future where streams of revenue play in his imagination.

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

Taste refers to the past imagination to the future.

Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future too like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination.

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.