What liberates the imagination is the sense that work in its theory and practice holds aesthetic possibilities, that jobs can be elegantly conceived and gracefully done. This sense of beauty unlocks feelings of pleasure and love and breaks down the barrier between worker and work and commit to work not merely the "thinking" consciousness but the full resources of mind.
Robert Grudin
Source: The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation, Pages: 55
The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination.
...thinking from the end causes me to behave as if all that I'd like to create is already here. My credo is: Imagine myself to be and I shall be, and it's an image that I keep with me at all times.
Your will is the ego part of you that believes you're separate from others, separate from what you'd like to accomplish or have, and separate from God. It also believes that you are your acquisitions, achievements, and accolades. This ego will wants you to constantly acquire evidence of your importance... On the other hand, your imagination is the concept of Spirit within you. ...with imagination, we have the power to be anything we desire to be.
We live in a world of color. All nature is color: white, black, and grey do not exist except in theory; they are never seen by the eye - they could only exist in a world that was colorless. Such a universe is beyond imagination: a world without color would be a world without light, for light and color are inseparable.
E. Ambrose Webster
Source: E. Ambrose Webster: Early Modernist Painter
Be what you would seem to be - or if you'd like it put more simply - Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)
Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Pages: Chapter 9