Quotes about dreams (4413 quotes, page 25)

“When I did TV shows and movies, the studios did demographic research. They were shocked to find that my audience isn't just men who are too drunk to turn off the TV after football. It's women, too. I don't know exactly why, other than that I've tried to remain true to myself for all these years. I have gone through a lot, and I've been open about it. Maybe they look at me and can see how you can grow up, have children, continue to be sexy, get married and divorced and, though you grew up poor, live the American dream. I'm very blessed. I'm happy for it all.”

Pamela Anderson (1967) Canadian-American model, producer, author, former showgirl

Playboy, May 2004.

Women , Men , Children , Football

“My dream is to perform in a big, celebratory concert in a free Cuba, but I don't think they'd even let me into the country. And if they did, I'd have to speak against what is going on, which the government fears. I don't know how much change toward democracy we'll see as long as one of the Castro brothers is around, but I do believe there is a future with a new leader someday. But this leader will also love Cuba and really want to take her forward. When that day comes, Emilio and I will be there in any way that we can be of service.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Latina Magazine (September, 2007)
2007, 2008

Love , Fear , Way , Democracy

“Swiftly walk over the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear, —
Swift be thy flight!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

To Night http://www.readprint.com/work-1379/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1821), st. 1

Fear , Joy , Night

“The essays in simulation of [Paul] Eluard and [Andre] Breton, Breton's recent poem-objects, the latest images of Rene Magritte, the "method" of the latest sculpture of Picasso and the theoretic and pictorial activity of Salvador Dali prove this need of concrete materialisation in current reality, of giving objective value on the real plane to the delirious unknown world of our irrational experiences. Against the remembrance of dreams and the virtual and impossible images of purely receptive states, "that can only be recounted", there are the physical facts of "objective" irrationality, with which one can already actually wound oneself.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 14-15

World , Reality

“I know not what discoveries, what inventions, what thoughts may leap from the brain of the world. I know not what garments of glory may be woven by the years to come. I cannot dream of the victories to be won upon the fields of thought; but I do know, that coming from the infinite sea of the future, there will never touch this "bank and shoal of time" a richer gift, a rarer blessing than liberty for man, for woman, and for child.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)

World , Time , Future , Victory

“And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness,
Vaguely and incoherently, some dream
Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills...
A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam;
Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

World , Sadness , Sun

“Too many leaders are afraid of letting their minds wander too far; they put fences around their dreams. If you want to accomplish great things, you must dare to venture beyond today’s realities. The thinking behind ‘Imagine the Possible’ was that we needed to push even further, beyond the self-imposed limits of our current thought processes and previous experiences.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 107.
On Leading Well

Imagination , Thinking , Reality

“p>One translucent day I leave the city
to visit my home, the land of Champa.Here are stupas gaunt with yearning,
ancient temples ruined by time,
streams that creep alone through the dark
past peeling statues that moan of Champa.Here are dense and drooping forests
where long processions, lost souls of Champa,
march; and evening spills through thick,
fragrant leaves, mingling with the cries of moorhens.Here is the field where two great armies
were reduced to a horde of clamoring souls.
Champa blood still cascades in streams of hatred
to grinding oceans filled with Champa bones.Here too are placid images: hamlets at rest
in evening sun, Champa girls gliding homeward,
their light chatter floating
with the pink and saffron of their dresses.Here are magnificent sunbaked palaces,
temples that blaze in cerulean skies.
Here battleships dream on the glossy river, while the thunder
of sacred elephants shakes the walls.Here, in opaque light sinking through lapis lazuli,
the Champa king and his men are lost in a maze of flesh
as dancers weave, wreathe, entranced,
their bodies harmonizing with the flutes.All this I saw on my way home years ago
and still I am obsessed,
my mind stunned, sagged with sorrow
for the race of Champa.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"On the Way Home", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 167; quoted in full in Buddhism & Zen in Vietnam by Thich Thien-an (Tuttle Publishing, 1992)

Men , Way , Home , Soul

“Now I've been happy lately
Thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be
Something good has begun. Oh, I've been smiling lately
Dreaming about the world as one
And I believe it could be
Someday it's going to come.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Peace Train - Earth Tour performance (1976) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sjSHazjrWg - 2006 performance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7wEctHyuc0 - Nobel Concert (2006) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7iLPnDCQ1g
Song lyrics, Teaser and the Firecat (1971)

World , Smile , Thinking , Happiness

“A world without nuclear weapons may be a dream but you cannot base a sure defence on dreams. Without far greater trust and confidence between East and West than exists at present, a world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech at a Soviet Official banquet http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106776, St George's Halls, the Kremlin (30 March 1987)
Second term as Prime Minister

World , Confidence

“The vine... is not the root merely, but all - root, stem, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit: and Jesus is not only that: He is soil and sunshine, air and showers, and ten thousand times more than we ever dreamed, wished for, or needed.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(J. Hudson Taylor. Dwelling in Him. Robesonia: Overseas Missionary Fellowship).

Flowers , Time

“The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists — haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"The voice of the lonely crowd" (2002)

Religion

“If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it's no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

"Congress's Shameful Retreat From American Values" in The Chicago Tribune (4 October 2006)

“When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)

Men , Reality , Time

“Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Love , Life , World , Soul

“Ther days may come,/Ther days may go,/But still the light of Mem'ry weaves/Those gentle dreams/Of long ago”

T. H. White book The Queen of Air and Darkness

The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939)

Light

“Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 624

Study , Help

“At night I wake up and think, What color will make me feel better when I soak in the bathtub for an hour? I want everyone who's dreaming of a glamorous life to know that I'd trade a good bath any day for the heels, the hair, the makeup, the tight dresses, the photographs, the small talk.”

Salma Hayek (1966) Mexican-American actress and producer

O interview (2003)

Life , Color , Feeling , Thinking

“Projections actually involve a change of atomic structure. Consciousness simply changes its form. When projection is first accomplished, there is a strong charge of sexual hormones which are also utilized in projection. After projection is accomplished, however, there is a marked decline in chemical activity and hormone action, a drop in body temperature and a drop in blood pressure. The rapid eye movements noted by dream investigators cease entirely.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 347, quoting from Session 276

Strong , Change

“If I ventured in the slipstream,
Between the viaducts of your dream,
Where immobile steel rims crack,
And the ditch in the back roads stop,
Could you find me?
Would you kiss my eyes?
To lay me down,
In silence easy,
To be born again.
To be born again.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Astral Weeks
Song lyrics, Astral Weeks (1969)

Kiss , Silence

“Auspicious Prince! at whose nativity
Some royal planet rul'd the southern sky;
Thy longing country's darling and desire;
Their cloudy pillar, and their guardian fire:
Their second Moses, whose extended wand
Divides the seas, and shows the promis'd land:
Whose dawning day, in very distant age,
Has exercis'd the sacred prophet's rage:
The people's pray'r, the glad diviner's theme,
The young men's vision, and the old men's dream!”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. I, lines 230–239.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

Men , People , Age , Distant

“It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 7

Reality , Appearance , Personality

“The American Dream can come in many different ways for many different people. It doesn't have to come in the way they explain it to you. Now, the American Dream can come if a guy hits the lottery. Who in the world thought he would hit a lottery? That's the American Dream for him. But I look at it from day one, moving up the ladder, and moving up the ladder. Now you get to the top of the ladder and you have to look back. How did you get to that ladder? To me, that's the American Dream.”

Willie Mays (1931) Baseball player

Academy of Achievement Interview (1996)

People , World , Way , Guy

“now I lay me down to dream of(nothing
i or any somebody or you
can begin to begin to imagine) something which nobody may keep.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

44
73 poems (1963)

Imagination

“Peter flung out his arms. There were no children there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung from trees.
"Do you believe?"”

J. M. Barrie book Peter Pan

he cried.
Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 13

Boy , Tree , Time , Thinking

“As a little girl, I would always ask my grandmother what it would take to be successful in life. … She said all you need are the three bones: the wishbone, the jawbone, and the backbone. The wishbone would keep you hoping and praying because hope is the motivator, but the dream is the driver. The jawbone will give you courage to speak truth to power, lift your voice — it should matter that you’re in the room, that you’re in that space with that voice. The backbone … will give you courage to stand through all of your trials and tribulations.”

Nina Turner (1967) American politician

"Nina Turner: Leader of the American Progressive Movement," Democracy in Color, June 30, 2016 https://democracyincolor.com/nina-turner-leader-of-the-american-progressive-movement-c822ea458204#.wg5lytrc9

Life , Truth , Hope , Girl

“I am a bird from mountains you don't know.
My throat feels itchy—so I start to chirp
when sings the morning wind among the leaves,
when dreams the moon at midnight in the blue.
Perched on a branch, the bird longs for its brook—
it will break into song and not know why.
Its ditties cannot make the fruits grow ripe;
its carols cannot help the flowers bloom.
It's profitless to sing, and yet the bird
will burst its throat and heart to sing its best.”

Xuân Diệu (1916–1985) Vietnamese poet

"Foreword to a book of poems", in An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems, trans. Huỳnh Sanh Thông (Yale University Press, 1996), <small>ISBN 978-0300064100</small>

Feeling , Mountain , Flowers , Bird

“I lay under the buckthorn tree. My soul was enchanted. I looked up through its leaves. The sun was coloring them a briljant yellow. They stood out from their delicate red stems, laughing at the sky.
And the sky was deep blue with one small cloud. And the blue was a glorious contrast to the yellow of the leaves. And the wind came and played with them, turning them over so that I could see their shiny upper surfaces. And the wind came down to me, too, bringing me armfuls of sweet fragrance.
The buckthorn was in blossom and that was the prettiest thing about it. Its scenty filled the soft air and covered me in a dream, tenderly, ans sang to my soul a tale of times before I ever was, and of times when I shall be no more..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

from her Journal, in Lilleon, June 1898; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker – The Letters and Journals, ed: Günther Busch & Lotten von Reinken; (transl, A. Wensinger & C. Hoey; Taplinger); Publishing Company, New York, 1983, p. 105
1898

Color , Soul , Tree , Time

“The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Source: Hellas (1821), l. 1060

Age , World , Faith , Smile

“For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay —
Except the dream that's almost dead today.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

Let America Be America Again (1935)

Hope , Dead

“I wanted something ephemeral, that would pass like a falling star and, most importantly, that would be impossible for museums to reabsorb. I didn't want it to be 'museumised'. The work had to pass by, make people dream and talk, and that would be all, the next day nothing would be left, everything would go back to the garbage bins.”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

Quote of Tinguely in a radio interview (1982), as cited in: 'Violand-Hobi', Heidi G. Jean Tinguely: Life and Work (NY: Prestel, 1995), p. 36 ; Talking about his Homage to New York; Cited in: John D. Powell. (2009, p. 31).
Quotes, 1980's

People , Star

“But the point is, now, at this moment, or at any moment, we're only a cross-section of our real selves. What we really are is the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us -- the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream.”

J.B. Priestley Time and the Conways

Time and the Conways, p. 60.

Life , Time

“How happy he whose toil
Has o'er his languid pow'rless limbs diffus'd
A pleasing lassitude; he not in vain
Invokes the gentle Deity of dreams.
His pow'rs the most voluptuously dissolve
In soft repose; on him the balmy dews
Of Sleep with double nutriment descend.”

John Armstrong (1709–1779) British poet

Book III, line 385.
The Art of Preserving Health (1744)

Sleep , Happiness

“We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Dreams"
The Plain Speaker (1826)

Forgetting

“Gnawing upon our resentment, we stretch out in an iron cage,
Watching the slow passage of days and months.
How we despise the insolent crowd outside,
Standing there foolishy, with tiny eyes bulging,
As they mock the stately spirit of the deep jungle.
Here by misfortune, shamefully caged,
We are no more than a novel sight to amuse them, some plaything…
O stately soul, heroic land,
Vast domain where yesteryear we freely roamed,
We see you no more.
But do you know that during our days of frustration
We follow a great dream, letting our souls race to be near you,
O formidable jungle of ours!”

Thế Lữ (1907–1989)

"Remembering the Jungle: The Words of the Tiger in the Zoo", in Understanding Vietnam by Neil L. Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), ISBN 978-0520916586, pp. 159–160

Soul

“I had hoped that out of so many stories you would at least have produced one or two, which could hardly be questioned, and which would clearly show that ghosts or spectres exist. The case you relate… seems to me laughable. In like manner it would be tedious here to examine all the stories of people, who have written on these trifles. To be brief, I cite the instance of Julius Caesar, who, as Suetonius testifies, laughed at such things and yet was happy. …And so should all who reflect on the human imagination, and the effects of the emotions, laugh at such notions; whatever Lavater and others, who have gone dreaming with him in the matter, may produce to the contrary.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Letter to Hugo Boxel (October 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza https://books.google.com/books?id=Nz1kRKDMbUMC (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).

People , Hope , Imagination , Question

“Aye, and deep and deep and deeper let me drink and draw,
From the olden fountain more than light or peace or dream,
Such primeval being as o'erfills the heart with awe,
Growing one with its silent stream.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Peace , Drink , Light , Heart

“Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires — this is a benevolent form. The ideal self expressed in letters is not a crudely sugary affair except in dreary personalities; in any case the ideal is very much a part of the character, having its twenty-four hours a day to get through, and being no less unique in its combinations than one's fingerprints.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Anderson, Millay and Crane in Their Letters" (p. 133)
American Fictions (1999)

Hope , Art , Communication , Parting

“Memory, prophecy and fantasy
the past, the future and
the dreaming moment between
are all one country,
living one immortal day.

To know that is Wisdom.

To use it is the Art.”

Clive Barker book The Great and Secret Show

The Great and Secret Show

Wisdom , Art , Memory , Past

“Boys today hardly aspire to immortal honor, the honor of self-fulfilling achievement. It is highly disapproved of in the code of the organized system. Instead, they devote themselves to protecting their “personal honor” against insults; and conversely they dream of the transient notoriety which will prove that they are “somebody,” which they doubt. The personal honor that they protect does not include truthfulness, honesty, public usefulness, integrity, independence, or virtues like that. A reputation for these things does not win respect, it has no publicity value; it’s believed to be phony anyway, and if it’s true, the person is hard to get along with.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 150-151.

Truth , Boy , Personality

“We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"Avatars of the Tortoise" ["Avatares de la tortuga"]
Discussion (1932)

World , Time , Parting , Falseness

“Would you maybe / Come dancing with me / 'Cos to me it doesn't matter if your hopes and dreams are shattered”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

The Girl In The Dirty Shirt
Be Here Now (1997)

Hope , Dance

“On December 16th, 1961 the world turned upside down and inside out, and I was born screaming at America. It was the tail end of the American Dream. Just before we lost our innocence irrevocably when the TV eye brought the horror of our lives into our homes for all to see. I was told when I grew up I could be anything I wanted a fireman, a policeman, a doctor, even president it seemed, and for the first time in the history of mankind something new called an astronaut. But like many kids growing up on a steady diet of westerns I always wanted to be the cowboy hero that lone voice in the wilderness fighting corruption and evil wherever I found it, and standing for freedom, truth, and justice. And in my heart of hearts I still track the remnants of that dream wherever I go in my never ending ride into the setting sun.”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Revelations (1993)

Truth , World , Justice , Home

“But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand.”

Ralph Ellison book Three Days Before the Shooting...

Source: Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010), p. 418.

Hope , Feeling , Nature

“The twilight fleeted away in pearl on the stream,
And night, like a diamond dome, stood still in our dream.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Night

“There are two suffixes in our language (and similar ones in other European languages) which suggest organized knowledge. One is the venerable, academic "ology," that reminds one of university curricula and scholarship. The other is the energetic and somewhat mysterious "ics," which has a connotative flavor of magic. Where "ology" suggests academic isolation (ichthyology, philology) "its" suggests a method of attack on life’s problems. It contains a faint throwback to the ancient dreams of the philosopher’s stone and of "keys" to the riddles of the universe. Ancient words ending in "ics" are mathematics and metaphysics. Of more recent origin are economics, statistics, semantics, and cybernetics.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

1950, p. 12 (1952, p. 123) lead paragraph
1950s, "What is Semantics?", 1950

Life , Mathematics , Knowledge , Problem

“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 5 (pp. 130-131)

Men , Stupidity , Religion , Beauty

“The hearsay that lieutenant general Manvel Grigoryan and lieutenant general Gagik Melkonyan support Levon Ter-Petrosyan does not correspond to the truth. These statements are absolutely false. All Deputies to the Defense Minister are performing their duties. The army doesn't deal with politics. We obey the orders of the Supreme Commander. Dreams of the opposition will never come true.”

Mikael Harutyunyan (1946) Armenian general

Quoted in article "Mikael Harutyunyan: no one will involve army in political processes." panarmenian.net [February 23, 2008]

Truth , Support , Falseness

“And now the story's just begun
A thousand years to stay;
We wake each morning with the sun
To live our dreams away…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Islands (1987)

Sun

“It is the nature of men to act negatively but to dream and hope positively.”

Edmund Cooper book Seed of Light

Seed of Light (1959)

Men , Hope , Nature

“Once again, I experienced that overwhelming joy in the universe that I had felt in London outside the V and A. But this time, my consciousness of the world seemed larger, more complex. It was the mystic's sensation of oneness, of everything blending into everything else. Everything I looked at reminded me of something else, which also became present to my consciousness, as if I were simultaneously seeing a million worlds and smelling a million scents and hearing a million sounds-- not mixed up, but each separate and clear. I was overwhelmed with a sense of my smallness in the face of this vast, beautiful, objective universe, this universe whose chief miracle is that it exists, as well as myself. It is no dream, but a great garden in which life is trying to obtain a foothold. I experienced a desire to burst into tears of gratitude; then I controlled it, and the feeling subsided into a calm sense of immense, infinite beauty.”

Colin Wilson book The Philosopher's Stone

Source: The Philosopher's Stone (1969), p. 237-238

Life , World , Beauty , Feeling

“And you, young engineer, you who dream of improving the lot of the workers by the application of science to industry — what a sad disappointment, what terrible disillusions await you! You devote the useful energy of your mind to working out the scheme of a railway which, running along the brink of precipices and burrowing into the very heart of mountains of granite, will bind together two countries which nature has separated. But once at work, you see whole regiments of workers decimated by privations and sickness in this dark tunnel — you see others of them returning home carrying with them, maybe, a few pence, and the undoubted seeds of consumption; you see human corpses — the results of a groveling greed — as landmarks along each yard of your road; and, when the railroad is finished, you see, lastly, that it becomes the highway for the artillery of an invading army…”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

An Appeal to the Young (1880)

Sadness , Disappointment , Home , Mountain

“All over the world, the nation, in a dream
Of money and love and sport, hangs at the paps
Of well-being, and so
Goes fattening, mellowing, dozing, rotting down
Into a rich deliquium of decay.”

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) English poet, critic and editor

Epilogue
Hawthorn and Lavender (1901)

Love , Money , World , Sport

“The principles and the purposes expressed in the Charter of the United Nations continue to represent our hope for the eventual establishment of the rule of law in international affairs. The Charter constitutes the basic expression of the code of international ethics to which this country is dedicated. We cannot, however, close our eyes to the harsh fact that through obstruction and even defiance on the part of one nation, this great dream has not yet become a full reality. It is necessary, therefore, that we take additional measures to supplement the work of the United Nations and to support its aims. There are times in world history when it is far wiser to act than to hesitate. There is some risk involved in action — there always is. But there is far more risk in failure to act. For if we act wisely now, we shall strengthen the powerful forces for freedom, justice, and peace which are represented by the United Nations and the free nations of the world.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Special Message to the Congress on the Threat to the Freedom of Europe (1948)

World , Peace , Justice , Law

“Your joy is only moment’s exhalation,
at most a blink of eye is your dejection.
As sweetly falls your silent sleep’s protection
you sink in soft earth’s breast, like wheat’s oblation.

Thus Beauty, whose completed germination
was hindered by unfinished life’s perfection,
will in your dying see a resurrection –
a thousand-fold its great reanimation.

For when you’re in your grave you’re handed over
to probing roots of lilac and of lime tree,
to buds the sap is drawn above the clover

aflame to burst in summer’s honeyed finery
of blossomed trees, and so your radiant dreaming
will sweet fulfilment find in springtime’s teeming.”

Kaarlo Sarkia (1902–1945) Finnish poet

Life , Beauty , Sleep , Tree

“Even the deepest contemplation only recalls us to our unreality. Seeing that the self we take ourselves to be is illusory does not mean seeing through it to something else. It is more like surrendering to a dream. To see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: The Ultimate Dream (p. 79)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Reality , Falseness

“Amado mio
When we're together
I'm in a dream world
Of sweet delight.”

Doris Fisher (1915–2003) American musician

Song w:Amado Mio

World

“In day from some titanic past it seems
As if a thread divine of memory runs;
Born ere the Mighty One began his dreams,
Or yet were stars and suns.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

"Day"
By Still Waters (1906)

Star , Memory , Sun , Past

“Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself.”

Jane Yolen book The Devil's Arithmetic

Source: The Devil's Arithmetic (1988), p. 143

Parting

“I thought some day I'd run into June and find my tongue and we'd go to a movie together. I'd choose something foreign with subtitles to show how sophisticated I was and she'd admire me and let me kiss her in the dark, missing a dozen subtitles and the thread of the story. That wouldn't matter because we'd have plenty to talk about in a cozy Italian restaurant where candles flickered and her red hair twinkled back and who knows what that would lead to because that was as far as my dreams would go.”

Frank McCourt book Teacher Man

Teacher Man (2005)

Kiss

“The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you should die, are you not certain of re-awaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Love , Question , Heart , Flying

“All things are hush'd, as Nature's self lay dead,
The Mountains seem to nod their drowsy head;
The little Birds in dreams their Songs repeat,
And sleeping Flowers, beneath the night-dew sweat;
Even Lust and Envy sleep.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

The Indian Emperor (1667), Act III, scene ii.

Mountain , Flowers , Nature , Bird

“In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act I
The Three Sisters (1901)

Life , Beauty , Appearance , Waiting

“On the average, people spend at least one-third of their lives asleep. While asleep, all of us dream, although we may not remember our dreams. It is important to understand exactly what is occurring while we are in that altered state so that we can use that time of sleep to enhance our functioning in the waking state.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 18

People , Understanding , Sleep , Time

“Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream
But of a shadow, summ'd with all his substance.”

George Chapman Bussy D'Ambois

Act I, scene i.
Bussy D'Ambois (1607)

““Dreams mean nothing,” he said coldly. “They are unreal.”
“They’re as real as anything else,” she shot back at him. “And they merely mean conscience.””

Fritz Leiber book Gather, Darkness!

Source: Gather, Darkness! (1950), Chapter 14 (p. 145)

“With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 11 : Money Et Cetera, p. 100

Life

“When your dreams tire, they go underground and out of kindness that's where they stay.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Libby Houston, in the poem "Gold" in Necessity (1988).
Misattributed

“Sometimes I get this crazy dream
And I just take off in my car
But you can travel on ten thousand miles
And still stay where you are.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

W*O*L*D
Song lyrics, Short Stories (1974)

Cars , Travel

“Men achieve tranquillity through moderation in pleasure and through the symmetry of life. Want and superfluity are apt to upset them and to cause great perturbations in the soul. The souls that are rent by violent conflicts are neither stable nor tranquil. One should therefore set his mind upon the things that are within his power, and be content with his opportunities, nor let his memory dwell very long on the envied and admired of men, nor idly sit and dream of them. Rather, he should contemplate the lives of those who suffer hardship, and vividly bring to mind their sufferings, so that your own present situation may appear to you important and to be envied, and so that it may no longer be your portion to suffer torture in your soul by your longing for more. For he who admires those who have, and whom other men deem blest of fortune, and who spends all his time idly dreaming of them, will be forced to be always contriving some new device because of his [insatiable] desire, until he ends by doing some desperate deed forbidden by the laws. And therefore one ought not to desire other men's blessings, and one ought not to envy those who have more, but rather, comparing his life with that of those who fare worse, and laying to heart their sufferings, deem himself blest of fortune in that he lives and fares so much better than they. Holding fast to this saying you will pass your life in greater tranquillity and will avert not a few of the plagues of life—envy and jealousy and bitterness of mind.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

Life , Men , Pleasure , Jealousy

“I dont care what people think about me? If I will start thinking that then what people will do. No work for them…Lol so think about me, admire about me, dream about me so I can show to world how sexy I am.”

Nikita Gokhale (1990) Indian Actress, Indian Model

"‘6 bold statements of Nikita Gokhale’" http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/marathi/movies/6-bold-statements-of-Nikita-Gokhale/6-bold-statements-of-Nikita-Gokhale/photostory/45617534.cms.TimesOfIndia.com. December 23, 2014.

People , World , Thinking

“I would like to testify that you did more than any former British Statesman to make a true friendship between the peoples of our two countries possible, and, if the task has not been completed, that it has not been for want of goodwill on your part. I hope that you may still be able to work for, and that we may both be spared to see, the realisation of our dreams,—to see our two peoples living side by side with a deep neighbourly sense of their value one to another, and with a friendship which will make possible whole-hearted co-operation between them in all matters of common interest.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Eamon de Valera to Chamberlain (15 May 1940), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 311.
About

Friendship , People , Hope , Sense

“Surrealism, is interested in a dream world that will penetrate the human psyche.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 140

World

“Glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams,
And shadows soon decaying.”

John Ford (dramatist) The Broken Heart

Act III, sc. v.
The Broken Heart (c. 1625-33)

“If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Introduction: The Custom-House
The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Truth

“I think that everybody has a backhoe in his or her head, and at moments of stress or trouble you can fire it up and simply push everything into a great big slit-trench in the floor of your conscious mind. Get rid of it. Bury it. Except that that slit-trench goes down into the subconscious, and sometimes, in dreams, the bodies stir and walk.”

Stephen King book Christine

Pt. 1, Ch. 18
Christine (1983)

Thinking

“Clear and cool, clear and cool,
By laughing shallow, and dreaming pool.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Song I, st. 1.
Water Babies http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/wtrbs10h.htm (1863)

“Today, I honor the memory of those brave settlers of Oregon, and pay tribute, as well, to the native Americans already inhabiting this land before pioneers like my great-great-grandparents arrived here in the mid-1800’s. Such dreams those pioneers had for this territory. Some instinct drew them here, a fate a pulling, a desire for deep and lasting change in their lives. They embraced that change. They sought it out. Theirs was a quest for new horizons, for new beginnings. For a new homeland. They rode. They walked. They staved. They forge. And they died. But they kept their eyes westward. They gave us Oregon.”

Barbara Roberts (1936) American politician

Barbara Roberts (1991) " Governor Barbara Roberts Inaugural Message, 1991 http://records.sos.state.or.us/ORSOSWebDrawer/Recordpdf/6777810", Oregon State Archives, Oregon Secretary of State.

Fate , Memory , Change

“Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms. For example, I can’t see who is in the next carriage, but it contains people traveling in the same time as me, as you, as everyone. The fact that we can’t speak to them or know what’s going on in that other carriage is completely irrelevant. They are there. So what we call ‘life’ is a train with many carriages. Sometimes we’re in one, sometimes we’re in another, and sometimes we cross between them, when we dream or allow ourselves to be swept away by the extraordinary.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Love , Life , People , Travel

“I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society. To plunge into society meant to visit my superior, Anton Antonich Syetochkin. He was the the only permanent acquaintance I have had in my life, and I even wonder at the fact myself now. But I even went to see him only when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached such a point of bliss that it became essential to embrace my fellows and all mankind immediately. And for that purpose I needed at least one human being at hand who actually existed. I had to call on Anton Antonich, however, on Tuesday — his at-home day; so I always had to adjust my passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a Tuesday.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book Notes from Underground

Part 2, Chapter 2 (page 56)
Notes from Underground (1864)

Life , Feeling , Home , Passion

“But there's nothing half so sweet in life
As love's young dream.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Love's Young Dream', st. 1.
Irish Melodies http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/moore.html (1807–1834)

For Him , Love , Life

“And I can't believe that we would lie in our graves,
Dreaming of things that we might have been.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Lie in Our Graves
Crash (1996)

Lie

“I don't think about (being) the face of the NHL - I just enjoy my time right now. Playing in the NHL was my dream come true and I'm playing with great players. I feel trust and I'm happy because I'm having the time of my life.”

Alexander Ovechkin (1985) Russian ice hockey player

Kevin McGran (October 28, 2006) "'Having the time of my life' - Capitals' Alexander Ovechkin says he loves to deliver hits and isn't averse to taking a few, either Rangers' Lundqvist's experiencing problems keeping the puck out this season, by Kevin McGran", The Toronto Star, p. E05.

Life , Feeling , Thinking , Time

“.. that distinguished aesthete [ Gustave Moreau, ] famous artist and art teacher in Paris, then] who paints nothing than rubbish, it is because his dreams are suggested not by the inspiration of Nature, but by what he has seen in the museums... I should like to have that good man under my wing, to point out to him the doctrine of a development of art by contact with Nature. It's so sane, so comforting, the only just conception of art.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in a conversation with Vollard, in the studio of Cézanne, in Aix, 1896; as quoted in Cezanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 66
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1880s - 1890s

Art , Nature , Teachers , Painting

“Neurotics dream of a good life, or a great suicide note.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

Life , Suicide

“To be in contact with scientists, to become in a small way a scientist myself if possible, perhaps to cast new light on physical phenomena, to be able to uncover what is real and definitive, was my life's great dream.”

Ernest Solvay (1838–1922) Belgian chemist, industrialist, philanthropist

quoted by [Pierre Marage, Grégoire Wallenborn, The Solvay Councils and the Birth of Modern Physics, Birkhäuser Verlag, 1999, 3-764-35705-3]

Life , Way , Light

“Hopeless, filthy, degraded, superstitious with the craven superstition which made them the easy prey of their unscrupulous clergy and left them wholly sensual and stupid; as animals, without the animals' instinctive joy of life and fearlessness of the morrow; with no ambitions for themselves or the children who turned to curse them for having brought them into such a world; with no time to dream or love, no time for the tenderness which makes life, life indeed — they toiled for a few cruel years because they feared to die, and died because they feared to live. Such were the people Turgot was sent to redeem.”

Evelyn Beatrice Hall book The Friends of Voltaire

Source: The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 8 : Turgot: The Statesman, p. 218

Love , Life , Children , People

“My darling, I will try to guess
What do you want or wish.
I know you prefer to dream
About a Gold Fish.
But I believe that you will find
The famous and gold key.
So, you will open the door.
You saw it in your dreams.
I know: you shall overcome
All troubles in your way.
But do remember every time
About “must” and “may.””

Volodymyr Melnykov (1951) Ukrainian writer, poet, composer

To my friend http://imirelnik.io.ua/s1954083/to_my_friends

Way , Fish , Time

“I say to my colleagues never confine your best work, your hopes, your dreams, the aspiration of the American people to what will be signed by George W. Bush because that is too limiting a factor.”

Nancy Pelosi (1940) American politician, first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, born 1940

[Associated Press, House Dems face uphill battle to end Iraq war, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17534366/, MSNBC.com, March 8, 2007, 2007-03-09]
2000s

People , Hope

“Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

F 88
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“He is lucky who, in the full tide of life, has experienced a measure of the active environment he most desires. In these days of upheaval and violent change, when the basic values of to-day are the vain and shattered dreams of to-morrow, there is much to be said for a philosophy which aims at living a full life while the opportunity offers. There are few treasures of more lasting worth than the experience of a way of life that is in itself wholly satisfying. Such, after all, are the only possessions of which no fate, no cosmic catastrophe can deprive us; nothing can alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived.”

Eric Shipton (1907–1977) British explorer

Shipton, in Upon That Mountain, 1943

Life , Fate , Way , Change

“Believe it or not, the fact is that God is supreme and pure; people are lying on a bed of ignorance and dreams and doubts. They expect God Himself to come, they pray for it, they ask for it, they announce about it, but when He comes they fail to recognize Him. And not recognizing Him in His physical form, they cannot recognize Him within themselves. People have forgotten their Creator.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Johannesburg, South Africa, 29 April 1972 - quoted on p213 of "Who is Guru Maharaj Ji?" published by Bantam, 1973
1970s

God , People , Lying

“What do we know? What do we really know? He licks his dried cracked lips. We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.”

Edward Abbey book The Monkey Wrench Gang

page 312
The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

Love , Death , World , Sun

“Freed from the sublimated form which was the very token of its irreconcilable dreams—a form which is the style, the language in which the story is told—sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression. … This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression. Sexuality is no exception.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 77-78

Freedom

“Everybody's got a hunger, a hunger they can't resist;
There's so much that you want, you deserve much more than this.
But if dreams came true, oh, wouldn't that be nice?
But this ain't no dream we're living through tonight.
Girl, you want it, you take it, you pay the price.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Prove It All Night"
Song lyrics, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)

Hunger , Girl

“The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyage through life? No. 55 sat at the corner of Dropsie avenue near the elevated train, or the elevated as we called it in those days. It was a treasure house of stories that illustrated tenement life as I remembered it, stories that needed to be told before they faded from memory. Within its “railroad flats,” with rooms strung together train-like lived low-paid city employees or laborers and their turbulent families. Most were recent immigrants, intent n their own survival. They kept busy raising children and dreaming of the better lie they knew existed “uptown.” Hallways were filled with a rich stew of cooking aromas, sounds of arguments and the tinny wail from Victrolas. What community spirit there was stemmed from the common hostility of tenants to the landlord or his surrogate superintendent. Typically, the buildings tenants came and went with regularity, depending on the vagaries of their fortunes But many remained for a lifetime, imprisoned by poverty or old age. There was no real privacy or anonymity. Everybody knew about everybody. Human dramas, both good and bad, instantly gathered witness like ants swarming around a piece of dropped food. From window to window or on the stoop below, the tenants analyzed, evaluated and critiqued each happening, following an obligatory admission that it was really none of their business.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XV-XVI, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

Life , Hostility , Children , Lie

“Where will you go from here?' he asked.Chellin shrugged. 'Who knows? North again. Maybe not. I'm tired of this life, Kiall. I may head south, to Drenai land. Buy a farm, raise a family.'
'And have raiders descend on you to steal your daughters?'
Chellin nodded and sighed. 'Yes. Like all dreams, it doesn't bear close examination […]”

David Gemmell book Quest for Lost Heroes

Source: Drenai series, Quest for Lost Heroes, Ch. 10

Life , Family , Daughters

“You follow your feelings, you follow your dreams;
You follow the leader into the trees.
And what's in there waiting, neither one of us knows.
You gotta keep one eye open the further you go.”

Tom Petty (1950–2017) American musician

Wake Up Time
Lyrics, Wildflowers (1994)

Feeling , Tree , Waiting

“At the age of eight, my dream was to become a world champion; and now I've achieved that title. I've achieved it not only for myself, but achieved it for the British people and also the Pakistani community - and all the Muslims in the country. It's a great feeling, a dream come true for me and Insha'Allah in the future, I want to achieve more things like this.”

Amir Khan (boxer) (1986) British boxer

Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnUpFVChul0 with GEO News. (August 2009)

People , Age , World , Feeling

“My father once told me that the art of receiving a compliment is, of all things, the sign of a civilized man. He died soon afterwards, leaving my education in this important matter sadly incomplete; I'm only glad that, on this, the occasion of the rarest compliment he ever could have dreamed of, that he isn't here to see his son so publicly at a loss. In receiving a compliment, or in trying to, the words are all worn out by now. They're polluted by ham and corn. And, when you try to scratch around for some new ones, it's just an exercise in empty cleverness. What I feel this evening, is not very clever. it's the very opposite of emptiness. The corny old phrase is the only one I know to say it: my heart is full; with a full heart, with all of it, I thank you. This is Samuel Johnson, on the subject of what he calls contrarieties: "there are goods, so opposed that we cannot seize both, and, in trying, fail to seize either. Flatter not yourself, he says, with contrarieties. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice. No man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source, and from the mouth of the nile." For this business of contrarieties has to do with us. With you, who are paying me this compliment, and for me, who has strayed so far from this hometown of ours. Not that I am alone in this, or unique, I am never that; but there are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of us who still trudge stubbornly along this lonely rocky road; and this is in fact our contrariety. We don't move nearly as fast as our cousins on the freeway; we don't even get as much accomplished just as the family sized farm can't possibly raise as many crops or get as much profit as the agricultural factory of today. What we do come up with has no special right to call itself better it's just.. different. No if there's any excuse for us it all, it's that we're simply following the old American tradition of the maverick, and we are a vanishing breed. This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. And also, as a tribute to the generosity of all the rest of you; to the givers, to the ones with fixed addresses. A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way, or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy-o is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work (in other words I'm crazy). But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could never have been made otherwise. Or, if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn't have been mine. The truth is I don't believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it wasn't for this: my own, particular, contrariety. Let us raise our cups, then, standing as some of us do on opposite ends of the river, to what really matters to us all: to our crazy, beloved profession, to the movies — to good movies, to every possible kind.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Speech given upon his acceptance of the AFI Lifetime Achievement award. Viewable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXJnxClGamA&list=HL1349840607&feature=mh_lolz

Life , Truth , World , Education

Quotes about dreams page 25

Quotes about dreams
page 25