Letter to William Cabell (6 May 1783)
III, st. 3
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/
Source: View from the UN (1978), p. 23
Context: It is far from my intention to claim that I have reached a very high stage on the path to attainment of the highest wisdom, or that I have attained complete "inner peace." However, I can claim that I practice bhavana every day. I try to cultivate the ethical aspects of Buddhism, and I believe that I have attained a greater degree of emotional equilibrium than most people. This explains why the tragic news of the sudden death (in a traffic accident) of my only son, Tin Maung Thant, on May 21, 1962, with minimal emotional reaction. For are not birth and death the two phases of the same life process? According to the Buddha, birth is followed by death, but death, in turn, is followed by rebirth.
“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”
PART II, SECTION I.
An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)
“The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.”
Book of Dreams (1961) Foreword
As misquoted in Night and Day (1989) by Jack Maguire, p. 221; Maguire does not cite his source, so this widely quoted variant appears to be an erroneous paraphrase of this published statement. It is not a direct quote from some other statement by Kerouac.
Variant: All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
As quoted in Garry Davis Cult, Life (Jan 24, 1949)
Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)
