A Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.

Vladimir Nabokov

Quote Topics

Earth Flies Imagination Our Shadow

Quote Author

Vladimir Nabokov
American - Novelist
April 22, 1899 - July 2, 1977

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Sylvia Plath

Can imagination act Perpendicular to fact? Can it be a kite that flies Till the Earth , umbrella-wise, Folds and drops away from sight?

Philip Jose Farmer

A few moments before the sun sets, the dark Earth shadow begins to rise in the east... It is nothing less than the shadow of the entire Earth, cast upward onto the atmosphere itself... I saw it over the great plains, and I felt as if I could sense the Earth pivoting silently under my feet.

James Elkins

The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the Earth on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.

Ferdinand Magellan

The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow.

Leonardo da Vinci

Love like a shadow flies when substance love pursues Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues.

William Shakespeare

Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and, finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.

Augustus William Hare

Sometimes, when we're terrified of embracing our true calling, we'll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us. Are you pursuing a shadow career?

Steven Pressfield

Our primeval Mother Earth is an organism that no science in the world can rationalize. Everything on her that crawls and flies is dependent upon Her and all must hopelessly perish if that Earth dies that feeds us.

Viktor Schauberger

I believe our task is to develop a moral and aesthetic imagination deep enough and wide enough to encompass the contradictions of our time and history, the tremendous loss and tragedy as well as greatness and nobility, an imagination capable of recognizing that where there is light there is shadow, that out of hubris and fall can come moral regeneration, out of suffering and death, resurrection and rebirth.

Richard Tarnas

In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, And all you behold, though it appears without, It is within, in your imagination, Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.

William Blake

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Half our days we pass in the shadow of the earth; and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives.

Thomas Browne

Jung first gave us the term ‘shadow’ to refer to those parts of our personality that have been rejected out of fear, ignorance, shame, or lack of love. His basic notion of the shadow was simple: ‘the shadow is the person you would rather not be.’ He believed that integrating the shadow would have a profound impact, enabling us to rediscover a deeper source of our own spiritual life. ‘To do this,’ Jung said, ‘we are obliged to struggle with evil, confront the shadow, to integrate the devil. There is no other choice.’

Debbie Ford

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.