In the background...................................

 

The Pat Metheny Group............Imaginary Day

Was hoping for the sports.............

 

via the daily timewaster

no idea.....................

 

. . . What am I to make of this?  Where did it come from to the weary human who'd rather parse the mysteries of oatmeal topped with strawberries, but then any kid knows that during the long night the imagination thumbs its nose at civilization as the lid of a jar screwed on too tight that has no idea what its true contents are.

-Jim Harrison, Old Times

trained and developed..............

 

     The idea of the imagination as a muscle—as a faculty of the mind that could be trained and developed—had lodged with me.

-Albert Read, from his Introduction to The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (And How to Have More of Them)

Natural Resources..............

 

In speaking of the great resources of this country it should be kept in mind that the greatest of these is not the money in the banks, nor the minerals in the ground, nor the trees in the forest, nor the richness of our soil; but it is the mental attitude, and the imagination, and the pioneering spirit of the men who have mixed experience and education with these raw materials, thereby transferring them into various types of useful service for our own people and for the people of other nations.

-Andrew Carnegie, as quoted here

Got that right...............

 

Unlike his contemporaries, he did not consider the human animal the pinnacle of nature’s imagination. “Never say higher or lower,” he scribbled in the margin of a book, arguing with the author. “Say more complicated.” 

-Maria Popova on Darwin

judging........................

Imagine your future self judging your current life choices.  When making a decision, ask yourself how you'll feel about it when you are old.  What would your future self and family thank you for?  Simple actions now will compound to give them a better life.

-Derek Sivers

 

and he has a pretty good imagination..............

 I cannot ever imagine a world where economic volatility is tamed and people stop making financial decisions they eventually regret – no matter how much history of past mistakes we have to study.

-Morgan Housel

Air sax...........................

   

In the dorm rooms of our snowbound college 

during certain parts of the Coltrane solos 

featured on the album Milestones, 

parts we had deemed exceedingly worthy, 

we boys would play imaginary 

tenor saxophones by placing a thumb 

in our mouths, leaving the free hand 

to handle the intricacies of the fingering. 

and with puffed-out cheeks and eyes closed, 

we would blow hard, instead of sucking 

as we had done in our infancy. 

And even though we would step back 

to laugh at the silly pathos of ourselves, 

there was always great intensity and joy in our playing.

-Billy Collins

Image, if you will.....................

 .....................the voice of God.

perception...................

 Many things seem to us greater in imagination than in reality.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 6

the distant trail.........................

 The trouble with him was that he was not able to imagine. He was quick and ready in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their meanings.

-Jack London, from his short story, To Build a Fire

bridging.........................

     There are good biological reasons for accepting the fact that man is so constituted that he possesses an inner world of the imagination which is, different from, though connected to, the world of external reality.  It is the discrepancy between the two worlds which motivates creative imagination.  People who realize their creative potential are constantly bridging the gap between inner and outer.  They invest the external world with meaning because they disown neither the world's objectivity nor their own subjectivity.

-Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return To The Self 

Imagination...................

 There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

-G.K. Chesterton

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Let your creative and imaginative mind run freely; it will take you places you never dreamed of and provide breakthroughs that others once thought were impossible.
-Idowu Koyenikan

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
-Anatole France

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation 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

image via

Now........................

 

People don't realize that the future is just now, but later.

-Russell Brand

Imagine..................

 more fun here

Newell Convers Wyeth.............................

 

more here

An imaginary museum...................

 Like many people with an interest in art, I carry an imaginary museum around in my head.  I change exhibitions frequently, not in any orderly way, adding new pieces and putting old ones in storage.  I throw away very little, so that the place, if it can be called that, is cluttered.  One of the pleasant attributes of an imaginary gallery is that it can be any size, and there is no maintenance or upkeep and  no worry about conservation.  Nothing costs anything.  If the pictures I put in it sometimes gain in value and sometimes decline, it is a matter of taste (call it whim, if your please)—my taste—and any arguments about it are between my taste today and my taste of yesterday.

     It is almost impossible not to put what is in my museum in categories—landscapes, genre, nudes, portraits or nonrepresentational, religious, mythical, still life, and decorative paintings.  Though I have some sculpture and some objets de vertu and a great many drawings, that is about it, except for a very few photographs and prints.  My museum doesn't tend towards "mulitples" of any sort.  It is a matter of playing favorites;  I am under no pressure to put something in my museum because some critic, or generations of connoisseurs and dilettantes, have declared it to be a masterpiece.  One generation's masterpiece can obviously be the next generation's colossal bore, which does not change the nature of the object in the least.

-Russell Lyne, Life In The Slow Lane:  Observations On Art, Architecture, Manners, And Other Such Spectator Sports

Here are a few things hanging in my imaginary gallery:

a far horizon..................................

     To the east, the land runs for hundreds of miles of pure uncharted wilderness.
     Looking out toward it from the high ground, I feel the space enter me and expand me in some fundamental way.  The scope of the horizon liberates my imagination.  Staring daily at screens, we have lost what a far horizon does to the spirit.

-Boyd Varty,  The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

image via

the actual thing..........................

Our society is very result-oriented, that’s why we are so competitive. That’s why we are always stressed, because we are always looking at something in the distance. If you are always looking at the top of the mountain you are climbing, you cannot be aware of the grass and flowers growing at your feet. We are always looking ahead, aren’t we? And then the actual thing, the actual living, passes us by. We are locked inside our brains, cut off from the present moment, always centered on something beyond our reach. We are imagining this mirage of happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment which will magically appear once this and this and this happens. But what’s happening right now is “it” and it’s the only “it” we have. The rest is just fabrication.

-Tenzin Palmo, Reflections On A Mountain Lake: Teachings On Practical Buddhism

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