“What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.”
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.
Variant:
What is this life? A frenzy, an illusion,
A shadow, a delirium, a fiction.
The greatest good's but little, and this life
Is but a dream, and dreams are only dreams.
(trans. Roy Campbell)
Segismundo, Act II, l. 1195.
La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream)
Original
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción; y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son.
Variant: ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño;
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Pedro Calderón de la Barca 8
Spanish dramatist 1600–1681Related quotes
“A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream?”
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.
“They are the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness.”
" On Actors and Acting" http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/RoundTable/ActorsActing.htm (The Examiner, 5 January 1817)
The Round Table (1815-1817)
“May all your dreams but one come true, for what is life without a dream?”
“Life, what is it but a dream?”
Source: Everything Is Illuminated
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis
“Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming.”
Quote in Avant et Après, (1903); taken from Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, trans. (1923) Van Wyck Brooks [Dover, 1997, ISBN 0-486-29441-2], p. 2
1890s - 1910s
“What is not ephemeral in individual life, if life itself is fleeting like a dream.”
“Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams.”
Nobel Lecture (2010)