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Imagination

mental ability to produce and simulate novel objects, people and ideas in the mind without any immediate input of the senses
(Redirected from Imaginable)

Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses. Imagination is the work of the mind that helps create. Imagination helps provide meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world, and plays a key role in the learning process. Imagination is the faculty through which we encounter everything. The things that we touch, see and hear coalesce into definite forms through the processes of our imagination.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations · See also · External links

A

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  • An active imagination may find a bad tendency arising out of every transaction between imperfect morals.
  • The power of imagination, of image, which is the fundamental power of literature, is the power to determine a people’s fate.
  • creativity is not the monopoly of the Shakespeares and Einsteins of this world. There is a science of intelligent living, an art of being fully human, in which we all can and ought to be creative. To use our imagination is part of the total art of being. To imagine other people's imagination is part of the art of being with others.
  • We should train ourselves in the use of imagination when we are well, so that we are ready to use it when we are not...Like any other faculty, imagination can be starved and suffocated or stimulated and nourished.
  • A little knowledge is said to be a dangerous thing, but it is not dangerous to the imagination. Knowledge is to the imagination what fuel is to flame. A little feeds it; a great deal extinguishes it.
    • Alfred Austin, The Poet's Diary (London: Macmillan and Co., 1904), p. 158.

B

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  • Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it.
  • All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!
  • IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.
    • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).
  • The word "imagination" is... in my title. I want you to think of the following words: visual, vision, and visionary; and image, imagery, imagination. ..."Imagination" is a word which derives from the making of images in the mind, from what Wordsworth called "the inward eye."
  • What we really mean by free will... is the visualizing of alternatives and making a choice between them. ...the central problem of human consciousness depends on this ability to imagine.
  • Build castles in the air.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I, Section II. Memb. 1. Subsect. 3. Also in Romaunt of the Rose. Come nous dicimus in nubibus. (As we said in the clouds.) John Rastell, Leg Termes de la Ley. (1527). * * * his master was in a manner always in a wrong Boxe and building castels in the ayre or catching Hares with Tabers. Letter by F. A. to L. B. 1575–76. Repr. in Miscell. Antiq. Anglic.

C

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D

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  • Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?
    • Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations., as translated by Edward MacCurdy.
  • Une peinture, c'est d'abord un produit de l'imagination de l'artiste, ce ne doir jamais être une copie. Si, ensuite, on peut y ajouter deux ou trois accents de nature, evidemment ca ne fait pas de mal.
    • A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.
    • Edgar Degas, quoted in Maurice Sérullaz, L'univers de Degas (H. Scrépel, 1979), p. 13.
  • C'est très bien de copier ce qu'on voit, c'est beaucoup mieux de dessiner ce que l'on ne voit plus que dans son mémoire. C'est une transformation pendant laquelle l'ingéniosité collabore avec la mémoire. Vous ne reproduisez que ce qui vous a frappé, c'est-à-dire le nécessaire.
    • It is very good to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what you can't see any more but is in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say the necessary.
    • Edgar Degas, quoted in Maurice Sérullaz, L'univers de Degas (H. Scrépel, 1979), p. 13.
  • Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.
    • Walt Disney, as quoted in The Quotable Walt Disney (2001).

E

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I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. ~ Albert Einstein
  • I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
    • Albert Einstein, as quoted in "What Life Means to Einstein : An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" in The Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 202 (26 October 1929), p. 117
    • Variant: I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
      • Albert Einstein, Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97; also in Transformation : Arts, Communication, Environment (1950) by Harry Holtzman, p. 138.

F

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  • The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. They try to test our imagination in the following way. They say, “Here is a picture of some people in a situation. What do you imagine will happen next?” When we say, “I can’t imagine,” they may think we have a weak imagination. They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know: that the electric fields and the waves we talk about are not just some happy thoughts which we are free to make as we wish, but ideas which must be consistent with all the laws of physics we know. We can’t allow ourselves to seriously imagine things which are obviously in contradiction to the known laws of nature. And so our kind of imagination is quite a difficult game. One has to have the imagination to think of something that has never been seen before, never been heard of before. At the same time the thoughts are restricted in a strait jacket, so to speak, limited by the conditions that come from our knowledge of the way nature really is. The problem of creating something which is new, but which is consistent with everything which has been seen before, is one of extreme difficulty.
  • Al right. I already see you turning off. I can see you say you don't understand me. You can't understand that it could be chance. "I don't like it!" Tough! I don't like it either, but that's the way it is! Ok? I don't understand it either. ..."It must be that Nature knows that it's going to go up or down." No, it must not be that nature knows! We are not to tell Nature what she's gotta be! That's what we found out. Every time we take a guess as how she's got to be, and go and measure... She's clever. She's always got better imagination than we have, and she finds a cleverer way to do it than we have thought of. And in this particular case, the clever way to do it is by probability, by odds.

G

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  • There is nothing more important than developing your imagination to transform your life from the inside world of your thoughts and feelings to the outside world of your results and manifestations.
    • Neville Goddard
  • I respect Kirkpatrick both for his sponges and for his numinous nummulosphere. It is easy to dismiss a crazy theory with laughter that debars any attempt to understand a man's motivation—and the nummulosphere is a crazy theory. I find that few men of imagination are not worth my attention. Their ideas may be wrong, even foolish, but their methods often repay a close study. […] The different drummer often beats a fruitful tempo.

H

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  • Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
  • Much memory, or memory of many things, is called Experience. Againe, Imagination being only of those things which have been formerly perceived by Sense, either all at once, or by parts at severall times; The former, (which is the imagining the whole object, as it was presented to the sense) is simple Imagination; as when one imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before. The other is Compounded; as when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaure. So when a man compoundeth the image of his own person, with the image of the actions of an other man; as when a man imagins himselfe a Hercules, or an Alexander, (which happeneth often to them that are much taken with reading of Romants) it is a compound imagination, and properly but a Fiction of the mind. There be also other Imaginations that rise in men, (though waking) from the great impression made in sense: As from gazing upon the Sun, the impression leaves an image of the Sun before our eyes a long time after; and from being long and vehemently attent upon Geometricall Figures, a man shall in the dark, (though awake) have the Images of Lines, and Angles before his eyes: which kind of Fancy hath no particular name; as being a thing that doth not commonly fall into mens discourse.
  • the power of imagination leads us to what's real... it's a bridge toward reality.
    • 1986 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin (1998)
  • I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books.
    • 1993 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin (1998)
  • I hope when artists write new characters, we invent new archetypes and they are visions of ways that we can be...What we need to do is to be able to imagine the possibility of a playful, peaceful, nurturing, mothering man, and we need to imagine the possibilities of a powerful, nonviolent woman and the possibilities of harmonious communities and if we can just imagine them, that would be the first step toward building them and becoming them. (1990)
    • 1990 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin (1998)
  • The explanation of every event as repetition, that the Enlightenment upholds against mythic imagination, is the principle of myth itself. That arid wisdom that holds there is nothing new under the sun … merely reproduces the fantastic wisdom that it supposedly rejects: … fate that … remakes what has already been.
  • Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compared to those angels whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings.
    • David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Section 4, p. 225.

J

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  • But there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of those people who have none, and Newman, now and then, in an unguided stroll in a foreign city, before some lonely, sad-towered church, or some angular image of one who had rendered civic service in an unknown past, had felt a singular inward tremor. It was not an excitement or a perplexity; it was a placid, fathomless sense of diversion.
  • Fantasy, or Imagination, are the names given to the faculty of reproducing copies of originals once felt. The imagination is called 'reproductive' when the copies are literal; productive' when elements from different originals are recombined so as to make new wholes.

K

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  • When I had my imaginary friend I would look out of the small glass panes of the window and fill them with steam. Then, I would draw a little window and go out through it. Opposite our house, there was a milk store that was named Pinzon, and I would travel from the little window through the “o” in Pinzon, and from there into the center of the earth, where I had my friend, and we would dance and play... I do not remember my friend’s house, and she had no name. She was like me in age. She had no face. The truth is, I do not remember if she had a face or not, and she was very lively. I could not describe her. (9 September 1950)
  • Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.
    • Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). as translated by Michael Henry Heim; Part Two: Soul and Body, p. 59.

L

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  • By the imagination, by its flattering brush, the cold skeleton of reason takes on living and ruddy flesh, by the imagination the sciences flourish, the arts are adorned, the wood speaks, the echoes sigh, the rocks weep, marble breathes, and all inanimate objects gain life. It is imagination again which adds the piquant charm of voluptuousness to the tenderness of an amorous heart; which makes tenderness bud in the study of the philosopher and of the dusty pedant, which, in a word, creates scholars as well as orators and poets.
  • [H]e who has the most imagination should be regarded as having the most intelligence or genius, for all these words are synonymous; and again, only by a shameful abuse [of terms] do we think that we are saying different things, when we are merely using different words, different sounds, to which no idea or real distinction is attached.
  • The old proverb, applied to fire and water, may, with equal truth, be applied to the imagination—it is a good servant, but a bad master.
  • 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 dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
    • T. E. Lawrence, Introductory Chapter. Variant: This, therefore, is a faded dream of the time when I went down into the dust and noise of the Eastern market-place, and with my brain and muscles, with sweat and constant thinking, made others see my visions coming true. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.
  • If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there's no way you can act morally or responsibly. Little kids can't do it; babies are morally monsters—completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.
  • I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of [the faculties of a mature human that exist in the child] is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty ... to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.

  • Imagine there's no countries,
    It isnt hard to do,
    Nothing to kill or die for,
    No religion too,
    Imagine all the people
    living life in peace...

    You may say I'm a dreamer,
    but I'm not the only one,
    I hope some day you'll join us,
    And the world will be as one.

  • For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

M

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  • Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.
  • His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
  • The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.
    • Ernst Mach Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung (1905) 3rd edition, p. 318ff, translated as Knowledge and Error: Sketches Toward a Psychology of (Scientific) Research; as quoted by Phillip Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy (1957)
  • How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun's rays, then sinking back to rest in the night. The whole world is in motion to the center. So also sounds. We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of turbulent streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect wings, enables us to hear, all around the world, the vibration of every needle, the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in circulation like particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full of avalanche debris - we hear them boom again, and we read the past sounds from present conditions. Again we hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.

P

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  • Cartman: What the hell do you think you're doing declaring leprechauns aren't real?!
    General: What?
    Cartman: You just can't declare that imaginary things aren't real! Who are you to say what's real?! Think about it: is blue real? Is love really real?
    Lab Tech: Imaginary things are things made up by people, like Santa and Rudolph
    Tom: Yeah, and they detract from real things, like Jesus.
    Tech 1: Maybe Jesus is imaginary too.
    Tom: Ooooh, you'd better not say that! You'll go to hell!
    Tech 7: It's possible that hell is also imaginary.
  • Kyle: It's all real. Think about it. Haven't Luke Skywalker and Santa Claus affected your lives more than most real people in this room? I mean, whether Jesus is real or not, he...he's had a bigger impact on the world than any of us have. And the same could be said of Bugs Bunny and Superman and Harry Potter. They've changed my life, changed the way I act on the Earth. Doesn't that make them kind of "real." They might be imaginary, but they're more important than most of us here. And they're all gonna be around long after we're dead. So in a way, those things are more realer than any of us.
  • It is by imagining what we truly desire that we begin to go there. That is the kind of thinking about the future that seems to me most fruitful, most rewarding.
    • Marge Piercy "WHY SPECULATE ON THE FUTURE?" in My Life, My Body (2015)
  • May I free myself from the ever-pressing chest
    and enter the garden of imagination
    by leisurely hiding brain on hill summits.

R

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  • Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
    • Richard Rorty, Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3, 1998.
  • The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.
  • The true function of logic,... as applied to matters of experience,... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.

S

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  • I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
    • George Santayana, Little Essays (1920, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith), 42: "Disinterested Interest in Life".
  • Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.
    • George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1967), pp. 62-64
  • Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
  • This is the very coinage of your brain:
    This bodiless creation ecstasy.
  • This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions; these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.
  • And as imagination bodies forth
    The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
    Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
    A local habitation and a name.
  • Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it
    To lie that way thou go'st, not whence thou com'st:
    Suppose the singing birds musicians;
    The grass whereon thou tread'st the presence strew'd;
    The flowers fair ladies, and thy steps no more
    Than a delightful measure or a dance.
  • When people tilt their heads just slightly to imagine another person's experience, the space inside the mind grows.

  • Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
    On one another, as a man depends
    On a woman, day on night, the imagined

    On the real. This is the origin of change.

    • Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), "It Must Change"" IV.
 
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos. ~ Wallace Stevens
  • The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
  • The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.
  • The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
 
The imagination is one of the forces of nature. ~ Wallace Stevens
  • The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.
  • Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.
  • An uncommon degree of imagination constitutes poetical genius; a talent which, although chiefly displayed in poetical composition, is also the foundation (though not precisely in the same manner) of various other arts.
    • Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Vol. I (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1792), Ch. VII: "Of Imagination", § I; p. 479.
  • Science will reach maturity
    when the brain can realize
    as quickly as it can imagine!
    Then problems will be—just to Imagine!
    • B. B. Stoller, Biologizing the Universe (1983)

T

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  • Conflict acting on intelligence creates imagination. Faced with conflict, creatures are forced to imagine what will happen, where the next threat will come from. If there has never been conflict, imagination never develops. Wits arise in answer to danger, to pain, to tragedy. No one ever got smarter eating easy apples.
  • [H]ow are mathematical activities like game-playing...? ...One makes sense of narrative, whether fictional or factual, by a mental construction that is sometimes called the world of story ...[which] may be the real world at some other time or right now in some other place, one sees that the imaginative effort is a standard way of understanding what people say... In order to understand connected speech about concrete things, one imagines them. This is as obvious as it is unclear how we do it. ...I imagine myself in those circumstances and ask myself what I can see. Pretending to be in those circumstances does not conflict with my certain knowledge that on the contrary I am listening to the news on my radio at home. The capacity to do this... encourages empathy, but it also allows one to do mathematics. ...This is often fun, and it is a form of playing with ideas.
    • Robert Spencer David Thomas, "Mathematics is Not a Game But..." (January, 2009) The Mathematical Intelligencer Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 4-8. Also published in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2010 (2011) pp. 79-88.
  • You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for — if you are honest — you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.
    • P. L. Travers, as quoted in Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (2002) by Jack Zipes.

V

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  • Henceforth play is such that the explanation for it must always be that it is the imaginary, illusory realization of unrealizable desires. Imagination is a new formation that is not present in the consciousness of the very young child, is totally absent in animals, and represents a specifically human form of conscious activity. Like all functions of consciousness, it originally arises from action. The old adage that children’s play is imagination in action can be reversed: we can say that imagination in adolescents and schoolchildren is play without action.

W

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  • There is no life I know
    that compares to pure imagination
    Living there you'll be free
    if you truly wish to be
  • Imagination was the key (as John Lennon was to claim, in a song too often misjudged as simpleminded).
    • Ellen Willis, “Coming Down Again” (1989) included in No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992)

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 386-87.
  • Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!
  • And castels buylt above in lofty skies,
    Which never yet had good foundation.
  • Es ist nichts fürchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne Geschmack.
  • Build castles in Spain.
    • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651). Lors feras chastiaus en Espaigne. Guillaume de Lorris—Roman de la Rose. 2452. Et fais chasteaulx en Espaigne et en France. Charles d'Orleans—Rondeau. Et le songer fait chasteaux en Asie. Pierre Grangoire—Menus Propos. Tout fin seullet les chasteaux d'Albanye. Le Verger d'Honneur.
  • Seem'd washing his hands with invisible soap
    In imperceptible water.
  • Delphinum appingit sylvis, in fluctibus aprum.
    • He paints a dolphin in the woods, and a boar in the waves.
    • Horace, Ars Poetica (18 BC), XXX.
  • Celui qui a de l'imagination sans érudition a des ailes, et n'a pas de pieds.
    • He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
    • Joseph Joubert
  • These are the gloomy comparisons of a disturbed imagination; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiration.
    • Junius, Letter VIII, To Sir W. Draper.
  • When I could not sleep for cold
    I had fire enough in my brain,
    And builded with roofs of gold
    My beautiful castles in Spain!
  • C'est l'imagination qui gouverne le genre humain.
    • The human race is governed by its imagination.
    • Napoleon I
  • Castles in Spain.
    • Storer, Peter the Cruel, p. 280, ascribes the origin of this phrase to the time of Don Enrique of Spain, on account of his favors being lavishly bestowed before they were earned. Mercure Français. (1616). Given as source by Littré
  • It is only in France that one builds castles in Spain.
    • Mme. de Villars, when made dame d'honneur to the wife of Philip V, of Spain, grandson of Louis XIV. of France.
  • I build nought els but castles in the ayre.
    • Thomas Watson, Poems. Arber's reprint, p. 82. See also Lyly, Mother Bombie, Act V, scene 3.
  • But thou, that did'st appear so fair
    To fond imagination,
    Dost rival in the light of day
    Her delicate creation.
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  1. ↑ https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin18.htm
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