Quotes about dreams

page 40

I've been very fortunate that way; how I believe I've been able to enable the dreams of others, and to some degree, lessons learned: I'm a professor — there should be some lessons learned — and how you can use the stuff you hear today to enable your dreams or enable the dreams of others. And as you get older you may find that enabling-the-dreams-of-others thing is even more fun.
The Last Lecture (2007)

Dedication
Casuals of the Sea (1916)
Context: To those who live and toil and lowly die,
Who past beyond and leave no lasting trace,
To those from whom our queen Prosperity
Has turned away her fair and fickle face;
To those frail craft upon the restless Sea
Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted,
Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily,
Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started;
To those poor Casuals of the way-worn earth,
The feckless wastage of our cunning schemes,
This book is dedicate, their hidden worth
And beauty I have seen in vagrant dreams!
The things we touch, the things we dimly see,
The stiff strange tapestries of human thought,
The silken curtains of our fantasy
Are with their sombre histories o'erwrought.
And yet we know them not, our skill is vain to find
The mute soul's agony, the visions of the blind.

Emblems of Love (1912)
Context: And where is now that palace gone,
All the magical skill'd stone,
All the dreaming towers wrought
By Love as if no more than thought
The unresisting marble was?
How could such a wonder pass?
Ah, it was but built in vain
Against the stupid horns of Rome,
That pusht down into the common loam
The loveliness that shone in Spain.
But we have raised it up again!
A loftier palace, fairer far,
Is ours, and one that fears no war.
Safe in marvellous walls we are;
Wondering sense like builded fires,
High amazement of desires,
Delight and certainty of love,
Closing around, roofing above
Our unapproacht and perfect hour
Within the splendours of love's power.

Letter to Gerald "Ching" Tyrrell, (11 November 1956), p. 28
1990s, The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997)
Context: Hopes rise and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of yesterday. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of music floats down a dark street.

Evolution (1895; 1909)
Context: Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When o’er the nursing sod,
The shadows broke and soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

Black Boy (1945)
Context: (If I were a member of the class that rules, I would post men in all the neighborhoods of the nation, not to spy upon or club rebellious workers, not to break strikes or disrupt unions; but to ferret out those who no longer respond to the system in which they live. I would make it known that the real danger does not stem from those who seek to grab their share of wealth through force, or from those who try to defend their property through violence, for both of these groups, by their affirmative acts, support the values of the system in which they live. The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.)

"Harlem"
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
Context: What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech in Orlando, Florida (September 21, 2016)
Context: When we leave people out or write them off, we not only shortchange them and their dreams, we shortchange our country and our own futures. That’s one reason why I care so much about supporting working parents. It’s one reason why I’m such a strong supporter of comprehensive immigration reform.... It’s also one reason why we’ve got to break down barriers of systemic racism, including under-investment that has held communities of color back for generations. That’s part of building an inclusive economy, too. And it’s why I believe we need to do more to help young people, who are left behind in the wake of the Great Recession, find those strategies and opportunities that will get them moving ahead again. And we’ve got to help older Americans who’ve displaced by automation and outsourcing in our changing economy.

Star Of My Heart (1913)
Context: Except the Christ be born again tonight
In dreams of all men, saints and sons of shame,
The world will never see his kingdom bright.
Stars of all hearts, lead onward thro' the night
Past death-black deserts, doubts without a name,
Past hills of pain and mountains of new sin
To that far sky where mystic births begin,
Where dreaming ears the angel-song shall win.

"Clowns' Houses"
Clowns' Houses (1918)
Context: p>The busy chatter of the heat
Shrilled like a parakeet;
And shuddering at the noonday light
The dust lay dead and whiteAs powder on a mummy's face,
Or fawned with simian grace
Round booths with many a hard bright toy
And wooden brittle joy:The cap and bells of Time the Clown
That, jangling, whistled down
Young cherubs hidden in the guise
Of every bird that flies;And star-bright masks for youth to wear,
Lest any dream that fare
— Bright pilgrim — past our ken, should see
Hints of Reality.</p

Letter to Hugo Boxel (Oct. 1674) The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (1891) Tr. R. H. M. Elwes, Vol. 2, Letter 58 (54).
Context: If I had as clear an idea of ghosts, as I have of a triangle or a circle, I should not in the least hesitate to affirm that they had been created by God; but as the idea I possess of them is just like the ideas, which my imagination forms of harpies, gryphons, hydras, &c., I cannot consider them as anything but dreams, which differ from God as totally as that which is not differs from that which is.<!--pp. 382-383

Niebla [Mist] (1914)
Context: All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?

Source: The Zahir (2005), p. 205.
Context: Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, p. 59

"If Wishes Were Horses, How Beggars Would Ride" - Live performance (29 June 1999) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyG_g73R0wY
Many Worlds Are Born Tonight (1998)
Context: I wish I could promise I'll
Be there when you dream
I wish that when you spoke to me
I'd know what you mean But you can't bring me comfort
By filling up my eyes
They don't stay dry
Hard as I try
Can't figure why
Made I this choice

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book VI, Lines 893–896 (tr. Fagles); the gates of horn and ivory.

Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), II
Context: Yes, I dreamed a dream, my dream of the third of November. They tease me now, telling me it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or reality, if the dream made known to me the truth? If once one has recognized the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake. Let it be a dream, so be it, but that real life of which you make so much I had meant to extinguish by suicide, and my dream, my dream — oh, it revealed to me a different life, renewed, grand and full of power!

"The Shadowland of Dreams".
Context: I knew I wanted to write. I had dreamed about it for years. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who die wondering, “What if?” I would keep putting my dream to the test — even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear of failure. This is the Shadowland of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn to live there. If you can't live here, get back to YOUR roots and LEARN to live here!

"life is but a dream."
1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

... There are residue dreams which are an extension of our waking life. Then there are what Carl Jung calls "big dreams" and my dream about the Tibetan Book of the Dead was one of those big dreams. One of those can change your life. It can change it for awhile or forever. Those dreams are in the same local time domain as when we have an experience of Holy Spirit.
Interview with Connie Hill at NewConnexion http://www.newconnexion.net/article/09-02/goswami.html (September 2002).

Elijah to Cyrano
The Other World (1657)
Context: The angel had told me in my dream that if I wanted to acquire the perfect knowledge I desired, I would have to go to the Moon. There I would find Adam's paradise and the Tree of Knowledge. As soon as I had tasted its fruit, my mind would be enlightened with all the truths a person could know. That is the voyage for which I built my chariot.
Finally, I climbed aboard and, when I was securely settled on the seat, I tossed the magnetic ball high into the air. The chariot I had built was more massive in the middle than at the ends; it was perfectly balanced because the middle rose faster than the extremities. When I had risen to the point that the magnet was drawing me to, I seized the magnetic ball and tossed it into the air again.

My Share Of The Task (2013)
Context: At the heart of the story is Afghanistan itself, a complex swirl of ethnic and political rivalries, cultural intransigence, strains of religious fervor, and bitter memories overlaid on a beautiful, but harshly poor, landscape. Without internal struggles or outside influence, Afghanistan would be a difficult place to govern, and a challenge to develop. And there have always been struggles and interference. But it's not just that. In her beauty and coarseness, in her complexity and tragedy Afghanistan possesses a mystical quality, a magnetism. Few places have such accumulated layers of culture, religion, history, and lore that instill both fear and awe. Yet those who seek to budge her trajectory are reminded that dreams often end up buried in the barren slopes of the Hindu Kush or in muddy fields alongside the Helmand River.

"Notes about Music" (29 March 1946) http://web.archive.org/19991001055247/www.geocities.com/Nashville/3448/music.html also quoted in A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (2000) by Bryan K. Garman, p. 244
Context: I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn't be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments — and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all — and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me.
And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)
Context: Where the ring of twilight gleams
Round the sanctuary wrought,
Whispers haunt me — in my dreams
We are one yet know it not.
Some for beauty follow long
Flying traces; some there be
Seek thee only for a song:
I to lose myself in thee.

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.

In a video interview, Dhirubhai Ambani & Chitralekha (16 January 1995) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7RHzOF991Q
Hindustan Times: News about Dhirubhai books http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/Kolkata/Dhirubhai-books-to-help-win-back-Maoists/Article1-776307.aspx
From interview with Chitralekha

"Proclamation 3422 — American Education Week, 1961" (25 July 1961) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=24146<!-- Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project -->
1961
Context: The education of our people should be a lifelong process by which we continue to feed new vigor into the lifestream of the Nation through intelligent, reasoned decisions. Let us not think of education only in terms of its costs, but rather in terms of the infinite potential of the human mind that can be realized through education. Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our Nation.

St. XXXIX
Adonais (1821)
Context: Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
He hath awakened from the dream of life—
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings.

Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), IV
Context: Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there. I have seen them myself, have known them and been convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh, I understood at once even at the time that in many things I could not understand them at all … But I soon realised that their knowledge was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to love, while they without science knew how to live; and that I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge.

Speaking of a dream not fully remembered, in Fragments of a Journal (1966)
Context: I am told, in a dream... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)
Context: We and it and all together flashing through the starry spaces
In a tempest dream of beauty lighting up the place of places.
Half our eyes behold the glory: half within the spirit's glow
Echoes of the noiseless revels and the will of beauty go.
By a hand of fire uplifted—to her star-strewn palace brought,
To the mystic heart of beauty and the secret of her thought:

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 7
Context: Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can re-capture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties; so Mole, after struggling with his memory for a brief space, shook his head sadly and followed the Rat.

Foreword
My Turn (1989)
Context: In 1981, when Ronnie and I moved to Washington, I never dreamed that our eight years there would be a time of so much emotion. But life in the White House is magnified: The highs were higher than I expected, and the lows were much lower.
While I loved being first lady, my eight years with that title were the most difficult years of my life. Both of my parents died while Ronnie was president, and my husband and I were both operated on for cancer. Before we had even settled in, Ronnie was shot and almost killed. Then there was the pressure of living under the intense scrutiny of the media, and the frustration of frequently being misunderstood. Everything I did or said seemed to generate controversy, and it often seemed that you couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing a story about me — my husband and me, my children and me, Donald Regan and me, and so on.
I don’t think I was as bad, or as extreme in my power or my weakness, as I was depicted — especially during the first year, when people thought I was overly concerned with trivialities, and the final year, when some of the same people were convinced I was running the show.
In many ways, I think I served as a lightning rod; and in any case, I came to realize that while Ronald Reagan was an extremely popular president, some people didn’t like his wife very much. Something about me, or the image people had of me, just seemed to rub them the wrong way.

2010s, 2011, Q&A with Former President George W. Bush (January 2011)
Context: My view is, is that we are a land of immigrants, and we ought to recognize that. As a matter of fact, I believe America's soul is rejuvenated when people come to our country and work hard to realize dreams. There is an orderly way to have immigration and that is to recognize people are coming here to do jobs Americans aren't doing, are not capable of doing, are unwilling to do. And we ought to have a process that enables people to come and do those jobs.

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.

Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus
Context: We have winning wiles and witcheries,
Such incantations as thy sterner wit
Did never dream of. Time hath been ere now
That Jove hath listen'd to our minstrelsy.
Till wrath would seem to drop out of his soul
Like a forgotten thing.

"A Pinch of Salt".
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)
Context: Poet, never chase the dream.
Laugh yourself and turn away.
Mask your hunger, let it seem
Small matter if he come or stay;
But when he nestles in your hand at last,
Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
Context: There is no Heav'en, there is no Hell; these be the dreams of baby minds,
Tools of the wily Fetisheer, to 'fright the fools his cunning blinds.
Learn from the mighty Spi'rits of old to set thy foot on Heav'en and Hell;
In Life to find thy hell and heav'en as thou abuse or use it well.

Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), II
Context: Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!

"Let's Go to the Olympics!" (18 May 2004) http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=thompson/040518
2000s
Context: These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.

The Wild Flag (1943)
Context: This is the dream we had, asleep in our chair, thinking of Christmas in the lands of fir tree and pine, Christmas in lands of palm tree and vine, and of how the one great sky does for all places and all people.
After the third great war was over (this was a curious dream), there was no more than a handful of people left alive, and the earth was in ruins and the ruins were horrible to behold. The people, the survivors, decided to meet to talk over their problem and to make a lasting peace, which is the customary thing to make after a long and exhausting war. There were eighty-three countries, and each country sent a delegate to the convention. One English-man came, one Peruvian, one Ethiopian, one Frenchman, one Japanese, and so on, until every country was represented.

450: Dreams — are well — but Waking's better
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)

"Keep Moving from this Mountain" http://www5.spelman.edu/about_us/news/pdf/70622_messenger.pdf – Founders Day Address at the Sisters Chapel, Spelman College (11 April 1960)
1960s
Context: In every age and every generation men have envisioned some promised land. Plato envisioned it in his republic as a time when justice would reign throughout society and philosophers would become kings and kings philosophers. Karl Marx envisioned it as a classless society in which the proletariat would finally conquer the reign of the bourgeoisie; out of that idea came the slogan, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Bellamy, in Looking Backward, thought of it as a day when the inequalities of monopoly capitalism would pass away. Society would exist onthe basis of evenness of economic output. Christianity envisioned it as the Kingdom of God, a time when the will of God will reign supreme, and brotherhood, love, and right relationships will be the order of society. In every age and every generation men have dreamed of some promised land of fulfillment of freedom. Whether it was the right promised land or not, they dreamed of it. But in moving from some Egypt of slavery, whether in the intellectual, cultural or moral realm, toward some promised land, there is always the same temptation. Individuals will get bogged down in a particular mountain in a particular spot, and thereby become the victims of stagnant complacency. So, this afternoon, I would like to deal with three or four symbolic mountains that we have been in long enough-mountains that we must move out of if we are to go forward in our world and if civilization is to survive.

Life Without Principle (1863)
Context: Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves, — sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but States, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.

Farewell speech at the Champs-Élysées podium, after winning his seventh Tour de France, quoted in "Paris salutes its American hero" by Caroline Wyatt in BBC News (24 July 2005) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/europe/4713283.stm
Context: Finally, the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics: I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets — this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. So Vive le Tour forever!

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), Dreams (1845)
Context: While on my lonely couch I lie,
I seldom feel myself alone,
For fancy fills my dreaming eye
With scenes and pleasures of its own.
Then I may cherish at my breast
An infant's form beloved and fair,
May smile and soothe it into rest
With all a Mother's fondest care.

Source: Figures of Earth (1921), Ch. I : How Manuel Left the Mire
Context: "Now I wonder what it is you find in that dark pool to keep you staring so?" the stranger asked, first of all.
"I do not very certainly know," replied Manuel "but mistily I seem to see drowned there the loves and the desires and the adventures I had when I wore another body than this. For the water of Haranton, I must tell you, is not like the water of other fountains, and curious dreams engender in this pool."

A Prescription for Hope (1985)

The Age of a Dream (1890)
Context: Imageries of dreams reveal a gracious age:
Black armour, falling lace, and altar lights at morn.
The courtesy of saints, their gentleness and scorn,
Lights on an earth more fair, than shone from Plato's page:
The courtesy of knights, fair calm and sacred rage:
The courtesy of love, sorrow for love's sake borne.
Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn,
We hunger against hope for the lost heritage.

"The Return of Jimi Hendrix"
Dream Harder (1993)
Context: I dreamed about Jimi Hendrix
he came back for one day
was born weepin' out of an egg
the mid-wife said
and straight away began to pray
with lifted head

"No End of Fun"
Poems New and Collected (1998), No End of Fun (1967)
Context: He has only just learned to tell dreams from waking;
only just realized that he is he;
only just whittled with his hand né fin
a flint, a rocket ship;
easily drowned in the ocean's teaspoon,
not even funny enough to tickle the void:
sees only with his eyes;
hears only with his ears;
his speech's personal best is the conditional;
he uses his reason to pick holes in reason.
In short, he's next to to one,
but his head's full of freedom, omniscience and the Being
beyond his foolish meat —
did you ever!

Petronius, as depicted in the novel, speaking to Marcus Vinicius,<!-- entirely fictional character, NOT the historical figure. --> in Ch. 1
Quo Vadis (1895)
Context: Pliny declares, as I hear, that he does not believe in the gods, but he believes in dreams; and perhaps he is right. My jests do not prevent me from thinking at times that in truth there is only one deity, eternal, creative, all-powerful, Venus Genetrix. She brings souls together; she unites bodies and things. Eros called the world out of chaos. Whether he did well is another question; but, since he did so, we should recognize his might, though we are free not to bless it.

Progress In Religion (2000)
Context: I have five minutes left to give you a message to take home. The message is simple. "God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". This was said by Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of modern science, almost four hundred years ago. Bacon was the smartest man of his time, with the possible exception of William Shakespeare.

"Auctorial Induction"
The Certain Hour (1916)
Context: I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not the actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my little tales.... Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give people what they want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Self, p. 324 - 325

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)
Context: My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can’t live without dreaming — as we can’t live without sleep. We are “conscious” beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep — the “unconscious.” It is nourishing, in ways we can’t fully understand.

Part Four, Chapter 12.
Blue Highways (1982)
Context: What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of? Maybe it's like the force in spores lying quietly under asphalt until the day they push a soft, bulbous mushroom head right through the pavement. There's nothing you can do to stop it.

1950s, Give Us the Ballot (1957)
Context: Three years ago the Supreme Court of this nation rendered in simple, eloquent, and unequivocal language a decision which will long be stenciled on the mental sheets of succeeding generations. For all men of goodwill, this May seventeenth decision came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of human captivity. It came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of disinherited people throughout the world who had dared only to dream of freedom. Unfortunately, this noble and sublime decision has not gone without opposition. This opposition has often risen to ominous proportions. Many states have risen up in open defiance. The legislative halls of the South ring loud with such words as "interposition" and "nullification." But even more, all types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters. The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition. And so our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote.

Music and Moonlight (1874), Ode
Context: We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; —
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

Section 14 : "Three-Cornered Play : Caroll to Alice to Computer"
The Riverworld series, The Magic Labyrinth (1980)
Context: How strange and unforeseeable! The world had been saved, not by great rulers and statesmen, not by mystics and saints and prophets and messiahs, not by any of the holy scriptures, but by an introverted eccentric writer of mathematical texts and children's books and by the child who'd inspired him.
The little girl become a woman, dream-ridden Alice, had inspired the nonsense not really nonsense, and this in circuitous and spiralling fashion had inspired her to do what all others had failed to do, to save eighteen billion souls and the world.

"Magnus and Morna", in Thirty Years, Poems New and Old (1880)
Context: And all day long, so close and near,
As in a mystic dream I hear
Their gentle accents kind and dear —
The old familiar voices.
They have no sound that I can reach —
But silence sweeter is than speech;

Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 132
Context: He who is called Brahman by the jnanis is known as Atman by the yogis and as Bhagavan by the bhaktas. The same brahmin is called priest, when worshipping in the temple, and cook, when preparing a meal in the kitchen. The jnani, following the path of knowledge, always reason about the Reality saying, "not this, not this." Brahman is neither "this" nor "that"; It is neither the universe nor its living beings. Reasoning in this way, the mind becomes steady. Finally it disappears and the aspirant goes into samadhi. This is the Knowledge of Brahman. It is the unwavering conviction of the jnani that Brahman alone is real and the world is illusory. All these names and forms are illusory, like a dream. What Brahman is cannot be described. One cannot even say that Brahman is a Person. This is the opinion of the jnanis, the followers of Vedanta. But the bhaktas accept all the states of consciousness. They take the waking state to be real also. They don't think the world to be illusory, like a dream. They say that the universe is a manifestation of the God's power and glory. God has created all these — sky, stars, moon, sun, mountains, ocean, men, animals. They constitute His glory. He is within us, in our hearts. Again, He is outside. The most advanced devotees say that He Himself has become all this — the 24 cosmic principles, the universe, and all living beings. The devotee of God wants to eat sugar, and not become sugar. (All laugh.) Do you know how a lover of God feels? His attitude is: "O God, Thou art the Master, and I am Thy servant. Thou art the Mother, and I Thy child." Or again: "Thou art my Father and Mother. Thou art the Whole, and I am a part." He does not like to say, "I am Brahman." They yogi seeks to realize the Paramatman, the Supreme Soul. His ideal is the union of the embodied soul and the Supreme Soul. He withdraws his mind from sense objects and tries to concentrate on the Paramatman. Therefore, during the first stage of his spiritual discipline, he retires into solitude and with undivided attention practices meditation in a fixed posture.
But the reality is one and the same; the difference is only in name. He who is Brahman is verily Atman, and again, He is the Bhagavan. He is Brahman to the followers of the path of knowledge, Paramatman to the yogis, and Bhagavan to the lovers of God.

Letters Written in Sweden (1796)
Context: It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organised dust — ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable, and life is more than a dream.

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 276
Context: Is our race but the initial of the grand crowning type? Are there yet to be species superior to us in organization, purer in feeling, more powerful in device and act, and who shall take a rule over us! There is in this nothing improbable on other grounds. The present race, rude and impulsive as it is, is perhaps the best adapted to the present state of things in the world; but the external world goes through slow and gradual changes, which may leave it in time a much serener field of existence. There may then be occasion for a nobler type of humanity, which shall complete the zoological circle on this planet, and realize some of the dreams of the purest spirits of the present race.

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)
Context: Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.
Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being.
This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Song lyrics, The Red Shoes (1993)
Context: Feel your hair come tumbling down
Feel your feet start kissing the ground
Feel your arms are opening out
And see your eyes are lifted to God
With no words, with no song
I'm gonna dance the dream
And make the dream come true…

Get Writing (2004), as quoted in Modern Women Poets (2005) by Deryn Rees-Jones, p. 392
Context: Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well.

Savitri (1918-1950), Book Two : The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Context: A memory steals in from lost heavens of Truth,
A wide release comes near, a Glory calls,
A might looks out, an estranged felicity.
In glamorous passages of half-veiled light
Wandering, a brilliant shadow of itself,
This quick uncertain leader of blind gods,
This tender of small lamps, this minister serf
Hired by a mind and body for earth-use
Forgets its work mid crude realities;
It recovers its renounced imperial right,
It wears once more a purple robe of thought
And knows itself the Ideal's seer and king,
Communicant and prophet of the Unborn,
Heir to delight and immortality.
All things are real that here are only dreams,
In our unknown depths sleeps their reserve of truth,
On our unreached heights they reign and come to us
In thought and muse trailing their robes of light.

"The United States of Europe", The Saturday Evening Post (15 February 1930)
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol II, Churchill and Politics, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 184.
The 1930s
Context: We are bound to further every honest and practical step which the nations of Europe may make to reduce the barriers which divide them and to nourish their common interests and common welfare. We rejoice at every diminution of the internal tariffs and martial armaments of Europe. We see nothing but good and hope in a richer, freer, more contented European commonalty. But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed. And should European statesmen address us in the words which were used of old, 'Wouldest thou be spoken for to the king, or captain of the host?', we should reply, with the Shunammite woman: 'I dwell among mine own people.

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)
Context: I could have been anyone.
You could have been anyone's dream.
Why did you have to choose our moment?
Why did you have to make me feel that?
Why did you make it so unreal?

"Variations," lines 31-33
Blood for a Stranger (1942)

IV, p. 29.
The Ship in the Desert (1875)
Context: I dared not dream she loved me. Nay,
Her love was proud; and pride is loth
To look with favor, own it fond
Of one the world loves not to-day …
No matter if she loved or no,
God knows I loved enough for both,
And knew her as you shall not know
Till you have known sweet death, and you
Have cross'd the dark; gone over to
The great majority beyond.

Source: In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965 (1972), p. 63-64
Context: At about the age of eleven, I was reading the thrillers of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace concerning Dr. Fu Manchu and other sophisticated Chinese villains, nurturing a secret admiration for these gentlemen because of their opposition to the suet-pudding heroism of our own culture, and because of their refined and mysterious style of life. While other boys dreamed of becoming generals, cowboys, mountain climbers, explorers, and engineers, I wanted to be a Chinese villain. I wanted servants carrying knives in their sleeves, appearing or vanishing without the slightest sound. I wanted a house with secret doors and passages, with Coromandel screens, with ancient scrolls, with ivory and lacquer boxes of exotic poisons, with exquisite brands of tea, with delicate blue porcelain, with jade idols and joss-sticks, and with sonorous gongs.

The Dark Angel (1895)
Context: p>Through thee, the gracious Muses turn,
To Furies, O mine Enemy!
And all the things of beauty burn
With flames of evil ecstasy.Because of thee, the land of dreams
Becomes a gathering place of fears:
Until tormented slumber seems
One vehemence of useless tears.</p

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

"I do not love you..." (1831)
Poems

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), Ch. 1 "Before The Beginning"
Context: Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream. The young look forth across the sea to a mirage of fairylands filled with hidden treasures; the aged turn to the fading past, and through the mist and haze that veils once familiar scenes, bygone events assume weird and fanciful proportions.

The Pardon
Context: I started in to cry and call his name,
Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head.
... I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

Cassandra (1860)
Context: Women dream till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are their life, without which they could not have lived; those dreams go at last. All their plans and visions seem vanished, and they know not where; gone, and they cannot recall them. They do not even remember them. And they are left without the food of reality or of hope.
Later in life, they neither desire nor dream, neither of activity, nor of love, nor of intellect. The last often survives the longest. They wish, if their experiences would benefit anybody, to give them to someone. But they never find an hour free in which to collect their thoughts, and so discouragement becomes ever deeper and deeper, and they less and less capable of undertaking anything.

Pointed to a sign on the wall: a spider with a line through it. "Oh, fair enough."
He said "I can offer you an upgrade, fifty quid, and we can include in it policies set in place by the Marquis de Laplace, the French scientist who declared that all things in the universe are predetermined, so you would be covered even if time-travel was invented during the period of rental.”
I said, "Nah, probably leave it."
Part Troll (2004)

"The Secret Inn : 'The Kingdom is Within You'" in Master Mind Magazine, Vol. VII, No. 3 (December 1914), p. 99
Context: p>Enough of dreams! No longer mock
The burdened hearts of men!
Not on the cloud, but on the rock
Build thou thy faith again;O range no more the realms of air,
Stoop to the glen-bound streams;
Thy hope was all too like despair:
Enough, enough of dreams.</p

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Context: Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity — most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to being with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.

Part XV - General corollary
The Natural History of Religion (1757)
Context: What a noble privilege is it of human reason to attain the knowledge of the supreme Being; and, from the visible works of nature, be enabled to infer so sublime a principle as its supreme Creator? But turn the reverse of the medal. Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men's dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.

Music and Moonlight (1874), Ode
Context: Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song's new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

What the Future Holds (1984)
Context: All my life, I have been driven by one dream, one goal, one vision: to overthrow a farm labor system in this nation that treats farm workers as if they were not important human beings. Farm workers are not agricultural implements; they are not beasts of burden to be used and discarded. That dream was born in my youth, it was nurtured in my early days of organizing. It has flourished. It has been attacked.

"Why I Like Business" in Manitowoc Herald-Times (21 July 1927), p. 3 http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/8420770/
Context: I like business because it is competitive. Business keeps books. The books are the score cards. Profit is the measure of accomplishment, not the ideal measure, but the most practical that can be devised.
I like business because it compels earnestness. Amateurs and dilettantes are shoved out. Once in you must fight for survival or be carried to the sidelines.
I like business because it requires courage. Cowards do not get to first base.
I like business because It demands faith. Faith in human nature, faith in one's self, faith in one's customers, faith in one's employees.
I like business because it is the essence of life. Dreams are good, poetical fancies are good, but bread must be baked today, trains must move today, bills must be collected today, payrolls met today. Business feeds, clothes and houses man.
I like business because it rewards deeds and not words.
I like business because it does not neglect today's task while it is thinking about tomorrow.
I like business because it undertakes to please, not to reform.
I like business because it is orderly.
I like business because it is bold in enterprise.
I like business because it is honestly selfish, thereby avoiding the hypocrisy and sentimentality of the unselfish attitude.
I like business because it is promptly penalized for its mistakes, shiftlessness and inefficiency.
I like business because its philosophy works.
I like business because each day is a fresh, adventure.

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966)
Context: "Heaven is what you mix all the days of your life, but you call it dreams. You have one chance to buy your Heaven with all the intents and ethics of your life. That is why everyone considers Heaven such a lovely place. Because it is dreams, special dreams, in which you exist. What you have to do is live up to them."
"I—" started Griffin, but the wizard cut him off with a blink.
"No, listen, please, because after this, all the magic stops, and you have to do it alone.
“You create your own Heaven, and you have the opportunity to live in it, but you have to do it on your own terms, the highest terms of which you are capable. So sail this ship through the straits, navigate the shoals, find the island, overcome the foam-devil that guards the girl, win her love, and you’ve played the game on your own terms."

As quoted in Screen Stories magazine (1967)
Context: When I was in school, I dreamed about becoming a psychiatrist or a ballerina. Like most girls I would dream about being a movie star too. But those dreams are the impossible kind, the kind you don't really set your heart on.

Sarkis an old Greek Shepherd, called the madman: Jesus and Pan
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: "And now let us play our reeds together."
And they played together.
And their music smote heaven and earth, and a terror struck all living things.
I heard the bellow of beasts and the hunger of the forest. And I heard the cry of lonely men, and the plaint of those who long for what they know not.
I heard the sighing of the maiden for her lover, and the panting of the luckless hunter for his prey.
And then there came peace into their music, and the heavens and the earth sang together.
All this I saw in my dream, and all this I heard.

Kennedy's "focus on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution of human institutions." was quoted by Barack Obama in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
1963, American University speech
Context: I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace — based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions — on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace — no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process — a way of solving problems.

Ode to Memory (1830)
Context: In sweet dreams softer than unbroken rest
Thou leddest by the hand thine infant Hope.
The eddying of her garments caught from thee
The light of thy great presence; and the cope
Of the half-attain'd futurity,
Though deep not fathomless,
Was cloven with the million stars which tremble
O'er the deep mind of dauntless infancy.

The Poet (1830)

"Over the Rainbow" in The Wizard of Oz (1939) - Judy Garland version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSZxmZmBfnU
Context: Somewhere over the rainbow,
Way up high
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.
Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.

After having dreams about physical terms, which he initially dismissed as a "misuse of physics terminology" by the unconscious, in a letter to Carl Jung (16 June 1948)
Context: Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies … Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of "second meaning" of the terms applied.

Nobel lecture (1989)
Context: Because we all share this small planet earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. That is not just a dream, but a necessity. We are dependent on each other in so many ways, that we can no longer live in isolated communities and ignore what is happening outside those communities, and we must share the good fortune that we enjoy.

"Elfin Song" (1850).
Context: What if there be a fated day
When the Faery Isle shall pass away,
And its beautiful groves and fountains seem
The myths of a long, delicious dream!
A century's joys shall first repay
Our hearts, for the evil of that day;
And the Elfin-King has sworn to wed
A daughter of Earth, whose child shall be,
By cross and water hallowe'd,
From the fairies' doom forever free.
What if there be a fated day!
It is far away! it is far away!
Maiden, fair Maiden, I, who sing
Of this summer isle am the island King.

Introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)
Letters and essays
Context: Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it.