Quotes about dreams

page 9

“What was the use of wealth and power unless they could be used to shape one’s dreams?”

“I do what many dream of, all their lives,
— Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive — you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat —
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) — so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
There burns a truer light of God in them,
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.”

“One afternoon, which is ever present in my recollection, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the city park and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe's Faust. The sun was just setting and reminded me of a glorious passage:
Sie rückt und weicht, der Tag ist überlebt,
Dort eilt sie hin und fördert neues Leben.
O! daß kein Flügel mich vom Boden hebt,
Ihr nach und immer nach zu streben!
Ein schöner Traum, indessen sie entweicht.
Ach! zu des Geistes Flügeln wird so leicht
Kein körperlicher Flügel sich gesellen![The glow retreats, done is the day of toil;
It yonder hastes, new fields of life exploring;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil
Upon its track to follow, follow soaring!
A glorious dream! though now the glories fade.
Alas! the wings that lift the mind no aid
Of wings to lift the body can bequeath me.
(tr. Bayard Taylor)
As I uttered these inspiring words the idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagram shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and my companion understood them perfectly. The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear and had the solidity of metal and stone, so much so that I told him, "See my motor here; watch me reverse it."”

“Once I dreamed I'd write songs.”

“Stars scattered everywhere,
tell stories from ancient times
their breathing connects
the earth and heaven and dreams are born,
to the forbidden abyss of infinity
silently a flower blooms.”

“The world is full of kings and queens
Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams,
It’s heaven and hell, oh well.”

“Believe me, mankind's truest madness is revealed to him in dreams. All word-craft and poetry is nothing but true dream-interpretation.”

“Longing for someone to touch, caress and meld into, is a strong human emotion of never-ending desire and want. When the desires do not exist in real life, we tend to live them through dreams and fantasies. We even resort to the extent of choosing a person we know and have feelings for to place a face on the illusion.”

“Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying”

“O dream on your black wings
you come when I am sleeping.”

“On a personal note, I am grateful to have had opportunities to journey into space. It took nearly ten years to see my dreams come true. It was indeed worth the effort and the wait.”

“We also need to be encouragers to our friends. Some of them have hopes and dreams, yet although they've prayed and watched and waited, there's been no answer from above.”

“Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.”

“Nothing hurts more than When our broken dreams don't let us live. It hurts when someone breaks our trust. It hurts more when someone plays with our feelings. It hurts when we don't get what we deserve. It hurts when someone throws us out from their life.”

“Mood swings are constantly haunting us, even in our dreams, from achieving perfection.”

“The people of today are incapable of accomplishing most of their dreams because they are living according to the liking of the opposite gender.”

“Had a dream, I was king; I woke up, still king”

“The dream of every cell is to become two cells.”

“We embrace this dream altogether, regardless of our class, our region, and our religious community. All these are secondary to me compared to human dignity, compared to the respect for the human being and the individual, compared to the right of the Lebanese to enjoy security, safety, and equality without any discrimination whatsoever, this is what matters to me. We must build the state of today for the year 2000, we do not want to go backward, restore and build on the remnants of the state of 1943.”

“Thinking of you keeps me awake. Dreaming of you keeps me asleep. Being with you keeps me alive.”

“No amount of security is worth the suffering of a mediocre life chained to a routine that has killed your dreams.”

“For the dream chaser:
Everyone is a dream chaser. It never means every dream that can come true.
I always admire for the one who has dreams.
He follows it and he can make it real.”

“We on an ultralight beam
This is a God dream
This is everything Deliver us serenity
Deliver us peace
Deliver us loving
We know we need it
That's why we need You now
Pray for Paris,
Pray for the parents.”

“Now I could let these dream killers kill my self esteem,
Or use my arrogance as the steam to power my dreams
I use it as my gas, so they say that I'm gassed
But without it I'd be last, so I ought to laugh.”

“It seems, we living the American dream
But people highest up got the lowest self esteem.
The prettiest people do the ugliest things
For the road to riches and diamond rings.”

“In dreams, beyond imagination, there is always a part of life.”

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”

“If you follow every dream, you might get lost.”

“Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.”

“All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream”

“At birth, we emerge from dream soup.
At death, we sink back into dream soup.
In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land.
Life is a portage.”

“Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house”

“It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.”

“Dreams can change histories and songs can alter destinies.”

“Don't think small when you pray. God has a way to bring your dreams to pass if you'll dare to be bold enough to ask.”

“Sing me a rainbow. Steal me a dream.”

“When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I've never really noticed the difference. I've always dreamt big.”

“I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it.”

“What are we, after all, without our memories … without our dreams?”

“I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I’d be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.”

“But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years.”

“The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.”

“Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.”

“It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.”

“You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.”

“I suppose you could pass for a starlet. You do have that femme fatale air about you. Like you crush boys’ dreams in your spare time.”

“The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.”

“If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.”

“But allow Riley to boss him around? Multiply "hell, no" by "dream on" and divide by "suck it," and the answer was "the wolf could bite the big one.”

“She saw in his eyes defeat of her wild dreams, her mad desires.”

“When I used to picture forever, it was always with the same boy. In my dreams, my future was set. A sure thing. This isn’t the way I’d pictured it. … The future is unclear. But it’s still mine.”

“What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.”

“It can take years to mold a dream. It takes only a fraction of a second for it to be shattered.”

“The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.”

“Running down a dream…
working on a mystery…
going wherever it leads…”

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”

“What every girl dreams of when she's dumped is - that the guy will someday feel regrest and come back and tell her all about it. And the beauty of it is you have no regrets whatsoever.”

“Ill show you a Sweet dream”

“Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again.”

“Is that me?,' Leo said. 'Like me--having this dream--looking at me having a dream?”

“I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.”

“Nothing is as real as a dream. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Because the dream is within you, no one can take it away.”

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.”

“Unequal lives give rise to unequal dreams.”

“You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams…”

“Everything is an illusion; that is the whole thing about it - illusion, immitation, a mirage. It makes me too sad. Its having like a good dream, you know you are going to wake up.”

“Dreams should make you think, ‘If I had the guts to do it and I didn’t care what anybody thought, this I what I’d really do’.”

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous bug…”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours..”

“They would place their hands together inside the circle so that they could walk in each other's dreams. It forged a bond that could not be broken. The circle represents love in eternity. For there is no beginning and no end.”

“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”

“And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.”

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

“Friends… they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.”

“A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.”

“We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today”

“Beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction”

“If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.”

“Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl… interrupted.”

“I was in the middle of a dream about garbage cans and frogs - don't ask, and I won't tell.”

“Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves-or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”

“All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.”

“Am I alive and a reality, or am I but a dream?”

“Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own idea about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention. Be Mad Scientists.”

“I will tell you the story of how we found ourselves in a realm where dreams are formed, destiny is chosen, and magic is as real as a handprint in the snow.”

“Those who wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia of dreams…”

“But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.”

“Your shallow men shall dream, dreams, your insightful men shall see visions.”

“I love three things," I then say. "I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth."

"And which do you love best?"

"The dream.”

“Promise me you'll never stop dreaming.”

“I want to explain how exhausted I am. Even in my dreams. How I wake up tired. How I’m being drowned by some kind of black wave.”

“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”

“Sometimes I worry that there’s not enough room in my brain for both my dreams and reality that I’m a hard drive with limited gigabytes and one day I won’t be able to maintain the firewall between them. I wonder if that’s what senility is.”

“She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don't dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?”

“You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”

“I will do my best to dodge tonight's depression
Hide in sleep
Damage myself in dreams
Wake up older, slightly more used.”

“She was his soulmate, as much a part of him as the very flesh and bone that made him. She was with him, in him, in everything he did. She was everything he wanted from his life, the very measure of his dreams.”

“After everything he'd built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life; one disappointing son and two suitcases.”

“Sometimes… sometimes I think the Asylum is a head. We're inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it's your head, Batman. Arkham is a looking glass… and we are you.”