“If you have never had a dream, perhaps you have only dreamt to be alive.”
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Fausto Cercignani 65
Italian scholar, essayist and poet 1941Related quotes
“There is only one dream worth having…to live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead.”
From a speech entitled Come September http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/politics/comeSeptember.pdf.
Speeches
Source: The Cost of Living
Philopatris, xxi, as translated in the epigraph, p. 8
The White Stone (1905)
“Among all peoples, the Greeks have dreamt life's dream most beautifully.”
Unter allen Völkerschaften haben die Griechen den Traum des Lebens am schönsten geträumt.
Maxim 298, trans. Stopp
Variant translation by Saunders: Of all peoples the Greeks have dreamt the dream of life the best. (189)
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), IV
Context: Oh, everyone laughs in my face now, and assures me that one cannot dream of such details as I am telling now, that I only dreamed or felt one sensation that arose in my heart in delirium and made up the details myself when I woke up. And when I told them that perhaps it really was so, my God, how they shouted with laughter in my face, and what mirth I caused! Oh, yes, of course I was overcome by the mere sensation of my dream, and that was all that was preserved in my cruelly wounded heart; but the actual forms and images of my dream, that is, the very ones I really saw at the very time of my dream, were filled with such harmony, were so lovely and enchanting and were so actual, that on awakening I was, of course, incapable of clothing them in our poor language, so that they were bound to become blurred in my mind; and so perhaps I really was forced afterwards to make up the details, and so of course to distort them in my passionate desire to convey some at least of them as quickly as I could. But on the other hand, how can I help believing that it was all true? It was perhaps a thousand times brighter, happier and more joyful than I describe it. Granted that I dreamed it, yet it must have been real. You know, I will tell you a secret: perhaps it was not a dream at all!
[Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations, 302]
as quoted in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson, page 689, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003, ISBN 0-375-41128-3.
“Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”
Source: The Lovely Bones