“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.”

Variant: Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming — well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate. Isn’t that true?
Source: The Hundred Secret Senses (1995)

Source: The Alchemist

Source: Wings of Fire, p. 112.

Education (1902)
Context: He who knows naught of dreaming can, likewise, never attain the heights of power and possibility in persuading the mind to act.
He who dreams not creates not.
For vapor must arise in the air before the rain can fall.
The greatest man of action is he who is the greatest, and a life-long, dreamer. For in him the dreamer is fortified against destruction by a far-seeing eye, a virile mind, a strong will, a robust courage.
And so has perished the kindly dreamer — on the cross or in the garret.
A democracy should not let its dreamers perish. They are its life, its guaranty against decay.
Thus would I expand the sympathies of youth.
Thus would I liberate and discipline all the constructive faculties of the mind and encourage true insight, true expression, real individuality.
Thus would I concentrate the powers of will.
Thus would I shape character.
Thus would I make good citizens.
And thus would I lay the foundations for a generation of real architects — real, because true, men, and dreamers in action.

Chelsea FC, Doctorate Honoris Causa degree award (23 March 2009)

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 65.

As quoted in Bursting at the Seams : A Wealth of Wit and Wisdom by, for, and about Women (2004) edited by Killy John and Alie Stibbe