Sermon quotes on imagination
Wendell Berry
But works of imagination come of an impulse to transcend the limits of experience or provable knowledge in order to make a thing that is whole. No human work can become whole by including everything, but it can become whole in another way: by accepting its formal limits and then answering within those limits all the questions it raises. Any reasonably literate reader can understand Homer without the benefit of archaeology, or Shakespeare without resort to his literary sources.
Wendell Berry
Imagination “completes the picture” by transcending the actual memories and provable facts.
Wendell Berry
What I know does not yield a full or adequate accounting for what I have imagined. It seems to have been “given.” My experience has taught me to believe in inspiration, about which I think nobody can speak with much authority.
Miguel de Cervantes
Journey all over the universe in a map, without the expense and fatigue of traveling, without suffering the inconveniences of heat, cold, hunger, and thirst.
The History of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha, 1856, p.56.
Christina Rossetti
We should exercise that far higher privilege which appertains to Christians, of having “the mind of Christ;” and then the two worlds, visible and invisible, will become familiar to us even as they were to Him (if reverently we may say so), as double against each other; and on occasion sparrow and lily will recall God’s providence, seed His Word, earthly bread the Bread of Heaven, a plough the danger of drawing back; to fill a basin and take a towel will preach a sermon in self-abasement; boat, fishing-net, flock or fold of sheep, each will convey an allusion; wind, water, fire, the sun, a star, a vine, a door, a lamb, will shadow forth mysteries.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.
Tish Harrison Warren
After the Enlightenment in the West, our collective imagination emptied the cosmos of supernatural life, as sure as industry emptied Cape Cod of cod.
Taken from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren Copyright (c) 2021 by Tish Harrison Warren. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Bessel van der Kolk
Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Viking, 2014.
Simone Weil
Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.
James Wood
Fiction does not ask us to believe things,,but to imagine them. Imagining the heat of the sun on your back is about as different an activity as can be from believing that it will be sunny. One experience is all but sensual, the other wholly abstract.
How Fiction Works
Walter Brueggemann
Questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.
The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 40.
Oswald Chambers
[If] your imagination of God is starved then when you come up against difficulties, you have no power, you can only endure in darkness.
“February 10,” in My Utmost for His Highest (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Discovery House, 1998).
Albert Einstein
Problems cannot be solved with the same consciousness that created them.
Skye Jethani
The challenge facing Christianity today is not a lack of motivation or resources, but a failure of imagination.
George MacDonald
In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully. —
Rick Richardson
We have immense difficulty practicing God’s presence and keeping God’s reality before our mind’s eye because we have dismissed or denigrated our capacity to intuitively and imaginatively apprehend and encounter God. We have lost the power of imagination and intuition.
Experiencing Healing Prayer (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 55.
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. . . .
The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.
Andy Crouch
Children, in particular, are driven to create—if we just nudge them in that direction. They thrive in a world stocked with raw materials. But too often, and with the best of intentions, we fill their world with technology instead—devices that actually ask very little of them.
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