A Quote by Ernest Hemingway

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Ernest Hemingway

Quote Topics

Imagination Ability Almost Always Cowardice Lack Simply Suspend

Quote Author

Ernest Hemingway
American - Novelist
July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Ernest Hemingway

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

Ernest Hemingway

Non-violence and cowardice are contradictory terms. Non-violence is the greatest virtue, cowardice the greatest vice. Non-violence springs from love, cowardice from hate. Non-violence always suffers, cowardice would always inflict suffering. Perfect non-violence is the highest bravery. Non-violent conduct is never demoralising; cowardice always is.

Mahatma Gandhi

Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.

Denise Levertov

Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the torturer.

Robert Smythe Hichens

Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.

Susan Ertz

One would always like things to get other performances. With the lack of publishing here it's almost impossible to have an orchestral work done abroad because people simply don't know they are there.

John Kinsella

The lack of imagination or invention most people display in naming pussies is almost beyond credence.

Carl Van Vechten

(I)t is simply wrong to confuse cowardice with appeasement. Cowardice is a failing of character. Appeasement is a failure of policy. Stalin appeased Hitler when he signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin was an evil character, to be sure. But cowardice really isn't the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Stalin ' that word is “sexy.” I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Jonah Goldberg

Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.

Arthur Koestler

Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage but simply because they have never organized their energies around a goal.

Elbert Hubbard

How do we not rue the many unchosen paths in life? A blessed lack of imagination. There are enough real glories along any path to swamp our meager ability to picture alternatives.

Terry Rossio

Henry Corbin creates the world - most of all his examination of the imagination and what the imagination was for him. Some philosophers would think of the imagination as a synthetic ability, how you put different things together. Artists more think of the imagination as creativity. So I really like the way that he presents the imagination as a faculty that allows one to experience worlds that are not exactly physical but are real nonetheless.

Ben Chasny

Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't - yet.