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"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."
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"I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't."

"It is always imagined before it is lived. In the world of thought, imaginations are lives, but people kill them before they grow to have life!"

"It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it."

"When you are very rational, you may not be able to dream or live in a fairy tale."

"Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates."

"The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart."

"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"

"I always felt as if I'd been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I'd take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send them scurrying off into the fields. I never knew where they went from there."

"If I wholly unleash my imagination and forcefully stretch it out beyond its own edges, even at such a point I can only imagine a thin shard of this most immense God. And even though it is but a thin shard, it will nonetheless be mesmerizingly colossal."

"I can ruthlessly press my imagination out beyond its very edges, and even in such a remote place I have not begun to touch the barest periphery of God's imagination."
Explore more quotes by Percy Bysshe Shelley

"All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth."

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

"We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!"

"In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect."

"I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity."

"Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself."

"And in a mad tranceStrike with our spirit's knifeInvulnerable nothingsWe decayLike corpses in a charnelFear & GriefConvulse is & consume usDay by dayAnd cold hopes swarmLike worms withinOur living clay."

"How many a rustic Milton has passed by Stifling the speechless longings of his heart In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies no longer tameless then To mould a pin or fabricate a nail!"

"At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart?"
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