“O dream of fame, what hast thou been to me
But the destroyer of life's calm content!”
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)
Quote in Avant et Après, (1903); taken from Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, trans. (1923) Van Wyck Brooks [Dover, 1997, ISBN 0-486-29441-2], p. 2
1890s - 1910s
“O dream of fame, what hast thou been to me
But the destroyer of life's calm content!”
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
Erinna
The Golden Violet (1827)
“Revenge is for dreams…never for reality.”
Alfred Bester book The Stars My Destination
Source: The Stars My Destination (1956), Chapter 12 (p. 194).
“A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream?”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky book The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), V
Context: A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.
“May all your dreams but one come true, for what is life without a dream?”
David Gemmell (1948–2006) British author of heroic fantasy
Pedro Calderón de la Barca Life is a Dream
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.
Variant:
What is this life? A frenzy, an illusion,
A shadow, a delirium, a fiction.
The greatest good's but little, and this life
Is but a dream, and dreams are only dreams.
(trans. Roy Campbell)
Segismundo, Act II, l. 1195.
La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)
“The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.”
Sigmund Freud book The Interpretation of Dreams
1910s <br class="br">Source: Quoting Plato, as translated by Abraham Arden Brill, "The Interpretation of Dreams" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Freud_-_The_interpretation_of_dreams.djvu/511 (1913 edition), p.493
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis