IMAGINATION IS FUNNY.....

Imagination is crazy, your whole perspective gets hazy....

The Human Condition, Rene Magritte, surrealist painter 1933

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. 
-Albert Einstein

im·ag·i·na·tion

iˌmajəˈnāSH(ə)n/

noun

  - the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.

 - the part of the mind that imagines things.

 - the ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful.

     - an act or process of forming a conscious idea or mental image of something never before wholly perceived in reality by the one forming the images (as through a synthesis of remembered elements of previous sensory experiences or ideas as modified by unconscious defense mechanisms)

      - the ability or gift of forming such conscious ideas or mental images especially for the purposes of artistic or intellectual creation

Writings and art that can enlighten us about Imagination:

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

Mark Twain

Rene Magritte, The False Mirror 1928

Note from me: Creative people often use their knowledge to recreate, reinvent, and envision new things using that knowledge and then imagination takes it to visions unknown. .... or as one person said, (and probably better!) .... 

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

-Joseph Joubert

Here is an example of one artist using knowledge to create an amazing imaginative image. Notice there is no concrete support for this dam. If you take one book out what happens? Does it represent the flood of knowledge and the teaching of wondrous imaginings that books give us? Is it a religious statement? It doesn't matter. What you see in it is all that matters. No rules here!

The "Book dam" or "Bible dam", 

Jarek Yerka Surrealist Polish painter

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. 
- G. K. Chesterton

"Castle in the Pyrenees", Rene Magritte, 1959

Without imagination a man is but a poor creature. His life is like a night without a moon to gild it. Christian Nestell Bovee 

"Golconda", by Rene Magritte, 1953 

The bird Imagination,

That flies so far, that dies so soon;

Her wings are colored like the sun,

Her breast is colored like the moon.

Elinor Wylie

"Hummingbird Girl", Rick Beerhorst (1960)

The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes. 

- Henry David Thoreau 

Untitled,  Photography by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems! Saul Bellow

What the Fish Was Silent About, Vladimir Kush

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.
- Edgar Allan Poe

The Dreamer, Christian Schloe (Digital Artist)

Indulge your imagination in every possible flight. Jane Austen

Sketches of birds in flight, Leonardo Da Vinci
(In order to imagine a flying machine)

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

-Carl Sagan

Ladder to the Moon, Georgia O'Keefe

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become. Buddha

The birth of Shakyamuni Artist Unknown

 Those of my pictures that show very familiar objects, an apple, for example, pose questions. We no longer understand when we look at an apple; its mysterious quality has thus been evoked.

-Rene Magritte:

The Listening Room, Rene Magritte 1928

And finally two of my favourite writers and one of my all time favourite illustrators!

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

- Lewis Carroll

"But who has won?" Arthur Rackman
Alice in Wonderland  1907

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. 

- Theodore Geisel (Doctor Seuss)