"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them."
- Charles de Lint, Into the Green

"Begin at the beginning ... then go on till you come to the end: then stop."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"A blank page or canvas ... so many possibilities!"
- spoken by Georges Seurat in the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
- John Steinbeck

"The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages."
- Richard Bach, "The Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul" from Illusions

"You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?"
- Terry Pratchet, Hogfather

"People didn't realize it, but they needed myths to survive, just as much now as when their forebears were alive. Perhaps more. Mythology embodied the world's dreams, helped to make sense of the great human problems. Just as the dreams of individuals exist to give subconscious support to their conscious lives, so do myths serve as society's dreams. The uncover the dark, hidden places where mysteries dwell and can turn to nightmare if left untended. They make sense of injustice in archetypal terms. They give men and women a blueprint for how they may respond to success or failure, tragedy or joy."
- Charles de Lint (writing as Samuel M. Key), I'll Be Watching You

"It's pretty neat out here."
- NASA astronaut Linda Godwin during a spacewalk

"Stunning vistas don't always produce eloquence."
- Bill Tammeus, columnist

"Creative minds always have been known to survive any kind of bad training."
- Anna Freud

"Free your heart from your mind. Embrace wonder for one moment without the need to consider how that wonder came to be, without the need to justify if it be real or not."
- Charles de Lint, The Ivory & the Horn

"I've discussed the value of failure in creative work.
Failure is terribly important.
... The notion that failure is a negative thing is wrong."
- Emma Thompson

"I will start strange conversations just to see what people will say."
- Nancy Springer, fantasy author

"Mortals were such that just the smallest taste of that sight would send them questing the rest of their days to recapture it. And while that questing would remain unconscious in most, while it would only be a tiny part of their overall being, it would be enough to return a spark of old glory to hearts that were dimmed. It wasn't the magic of the mystery that was important, nor the finding of it, but the quest itself.
It might save a forest, it might save one tree. One man might be kinder to another, when he might otherwise have passed the need by. It was beauty that needed preserving, whether it lay in a forest, a field, or a city street. Whether it was the workings of a plant, from seed to new growth to mulch, or the workings of some complex machine. There was room for everything in the world, so long as men remembered the beauty. And once seen ... they might not remember, but they would never forget."
- Charles de Lint, Greenmantle

"Do you believe in fairies? ... If you believe, clap your hands!"
- James Barrie, Peter Pan

"Sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

"Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life.
Don't let them scare you unduly, for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity."
- R.I. Fitzhenry

"The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person."
- Frank Barron

"Curiouser and curiouser!"
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"We try not to write about things we don't understand."
- Pete Palladino, lead singer for the Badlees

"Once upon a time there was what there was,
and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell."
- Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
- Jack London

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- Albert Einstein

"Some things have to be believed to be seen."
- Ralph Hodgson

"The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind."
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity."
- Gilda Radner

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

"Mediocrity does not see higher than itself. But talent instantly recognizes the genius."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spake Zarathustra"

"Chaos is my friend."
- Robin Chambers

"The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science."
- Albert Einstein

"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail."
- Edwin Land

"I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"To dream well, one must be capable of true awareness when awake."
- Charles de Lint, Svaha

"Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."
- John Updike

"Dreams shouldn't come true, because it makes you too happy. You are too afraid of losing them."
- Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
- Edgar Allan Poe

"It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis."
- Margaret Bonnano

"If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice."
- Alan Moore, The Killing Joke

"I am that merry wanderer of the night."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS.
Listen to the SHOULDN'TS,
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS.
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me -
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be."
- Shel Silverstein

"It's easy to believe in magic when you're young. Anything you couldn't explain was magic then. It didn't matter if it was science or a fairy tale. Electricity and elves were both infinitely mysterious and equally possible -- elves probably more so."
- Charles de Lint, "The Fields Beyond the Fields," Moonlight & Vines

"Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused -- hence all the old tales of elfin kingdoms moving further and further away from our world, or that magical beings require our faith, our belief in their existence, to survive.
That is a lie. All they require is our recognition."
- Charles de Lint, The Little Country

"A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed. It feels an impulsion ... this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all the clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond the horizons."
- Richard Bach, Illusions

"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives."
- Charles William Dement

"My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed -- my dearest pleasure when free."
- Mary Shelley

"If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time."
- Marcel Proust

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

"Nothing is really ordinary or familiar after all. Our small worlds are more surprising and interesting than we perceive them to be."
- Charles de Lint, "The Fields Beyond the Fields," Moonlight & Vines

"All men whilst they are awake are in one common world:
but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own."
- Plutarch

"...The important thing is: if you fail once, or if your luck is bad this time, the dream is still there. A dream is only over if you give it up -- or if it comes true."
- Neil Peart

"As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary."
- Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

"We call them faerie.
We don't believe in them.
Our loss."
- Charles de Lint, "The Fields Beyond the Fields," Moonlight & Vines

"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'"
- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah"

"Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which, if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare."
- H.F. Hedge

"Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind."
- Rolling Stones, "Ruby Tuesday"

"The world is made of Laws now. Laws of Hydraulics, Laws of Social Dynamics, Laws of This, That and the Other. No place for three-legged cyclops in the South Seas. No place for cucumber trees and oceans of wine. No place for me."
- Baron Munchausen

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
- T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."
- Edgar Allen Poe

"I'm as romantically inclined as the next person and can fully appreciate the notion of faeries dancing in some moonlit glade, or dwarves laboring over their silver and gold jewelry in some hidden kingdom, deep underground. Really, I can. But I also believe it's important to differentiate between fact and fiction -- to keep one's daydreams separate from the realities of day-to-day life. It's when you mix the two that trouble starts. ...
So I subscribe to the scientific contention that nothing is proven until it can be shown to be repeatable. It makes perfect sense to me that anything that only happens once should be considered anecdotal, and therefore worthless from a scientific point of view. If faeries live at the bottom of the garden, they should always be observable. Even if you have to stand on one foot during the second night of the full moon, with a pomegranate in your pocket and your head cocked a certain way. Every time you complete the specifications, you should see them."
- Charles de Lint, "The Pennymen," Moonlight & Vines

"Do believe in fairy tales. Hang on to the magic. Never lose your sense of wonder and whimsy, or you'll lose a part of your soul."
- Eulalie M. Banks

"Whatever you can do, or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"What happens when I fall asleep and step into my dreams can't be measured or weighed -- it can only be known -- but that doesn't stop these experiences from influencing my life and leaving me in a state of mild confusion so much of the time."
Ð Charles de Lint, "Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night"

"Touch magic, pass it on."
- Jane Yolen

"What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness."
- Leo Tolstoy

"Over hill, over dale,
Through bush, through brier,
Over park, over pale,
Through flood, through fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter then the moone's sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green:
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours;
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dew-drops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose."
- Charlie Chaplin

"The truth is beautiful, but the beautiful is not necessarily true."
- Timothy Ferris

"Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk."
- Jack Handey

"If your mind is attuned to beauty, you find beauty in everything."
Ð Jean Cooke

"The world has touched us in such a way that we can't look on a thing and appreciate its wonder and its beauty without seeking some practical use for it."
- Charles de Lint

"Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance."
- William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true."
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

"A mirror should reflect a little, before throwing back images."
- Jean Cocteau

"Honesty is the key to a relationship. If you can fake that, you're in."
- Rich Jeni

"The truth you speak has no past and no future. It is, and that's all it needs to be."
- Richard Bach, Illusions

"Tell the truth and run."
- Yugoslavian proverb

"Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any machine goes and actually FINDS it and we're straight out of a job, aren't we? I mean, what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?"
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."
- Aldous Huxley, a wild and crazy guy

"Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for."
- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

"It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak."
- Neil Gaiman, Dream Country

"...They discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying."
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow,
as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

"Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
- Sir Winston Churchill

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
- George Bernard Shaw

"Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah."
- Richard Bach, Illusions

"An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie."
- Aldous Huxley

"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
- unknown

"The road to truth is long, and line the entire way with annoying bastards."
- Alexander Jablokov, "The Place of No Shadows"

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it."
- George Bernard Shaw

"There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth."
- Maya Angelou

"Truth is a simple place reached by many different roads."
- Patricia A. McKillip, Winter Rose

"Like all great hypotheses, the theory of relativity relies on the basic assumption that nobody will ever be able to do the experiment which will prove it wrong; and anything that can't be disproved must be true."
- Tom Holt, Paint Your Dragon

"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense."
- Mark Twain

"The way I see it, it doesn't matter what you believe just so you're sincere."
- Charles Schulz

"When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth."
- George Bernard Shaw

"Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable.
But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops."
- H.L. Mencken

"I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue."
- Richard Nixon, discussing Watergate in 1978

"Facts are stupid things."
- Ronald Reagan

"The greatest of all pleasures consists in the contemplation of truth."
- Thomas Aquinas

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
- Albert Einstein, who had a lot of each

"They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance."
- Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

"We all not only could know everything. We do.
We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable."
- Neil Gaiman, Brief Lives

"Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life."
- Sandra Carey

"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You don't tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds."
- Richard Bach, Illusions

"Practically perfect people never let sentiment muddle their thinking."
- Mary Poppins

"What gets me is how everybody's looking to make sense of things. Sometimes you don't want sense. Sometimes, the last thing in the world you need is sense. Work a thing through till it makes sense and you lose all the possibilities."
- Charles de Lint, The Ivory & the Horn

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly."
- Richard Bach, "The Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul" from Illusions

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so,
it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited."
- Plutarch

"What men really want is not knowledge but certainty."
- Bertrand Russell

"Do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know."
- J.R.R. Tolkien

"If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking a beer, I bet it makes beer shoot out of your nose."
- Jack Handey

"Common sense is not so common."
- Voltaire

"A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice."
- Bill Cosby

"If you don't control your mind, someone else will."
- John Allston

"One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star."
- G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one."
- Voltaire

"Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well."
- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

"Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do."
- James Harvey Robinson, "The Mind in the Making"

"Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives."
- Abba Eban

"This fellow's wise enough to play the fool,
and to do that well craves a kind of wit."
- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night