quotations about dreams & dreaming
The dream-state, from the standpoint of the waking, consists only of thinking and feeling. But the dreamer has no idea that he is dreaming, for according to his experience, tangible objects are also perceived. Thus the dream-state is definable in exactly the same terms as the waking.
JOHN LEVY
The Nature of Man According to the Vedanta
Better to dream than to be.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Education of the Stoic
Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time. Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams, what utterly incomprehensible things happen to it!
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
When we can't dream any longer we die.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Mother Earth Bulletin
You can't put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get.
MICHAEL PHELPS
Woman's Day, Apr. 1, 2009
Our dreams need time and physical means and painstaking thought before they can be realized.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.
GEORGE ELIOT
Theophrastus Such
What I want to do is travel deep and deeper into the dreamlands, to find that place that I know is waiting for me here. My home.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
MUHAMMAD ALI
Esquire, Feb. 2012
What we experience in dreams -- assuming that we experience it often -- belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced "actually": we are richer or poorer on account of it.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
The blackest murder is the killing of the Soul's aspirations!
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
To be sure, the ancient belief that the dream reveals the future is not entirely devoid of truth. By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Interpretation of Dreams
Dream life, I realized, was only confusing when you were awake. It was from the perspective of waking life that dream life seemed fractured and lacking consequence, lacking any certainty that one thing led to another. But from within dream life, the world was generally coherent. Not exactly an unconfusing world--just no more confusing than any other.
ALEX GARLAND
The Coma
No man lives long when his dreams are dead.
GENE WOLFE
The Claw of the Conciliator
The dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning.
CARL JUNG
Psychology of the Unconscious
I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.
JAMES ALLEN
As a Man Thinketh
Well now what's the use in dreamin'
You got better things to do
Dreams never did work for me anyway
Even when they did come true
BOB DYLAN
"I Feel a Change Comin' On"
Dreams only change their houses.
They cannot be lined up against a wall
And quietly buried under ground,
And no more heard of ...
However deep the pit and heaped the clay--
Like seedlings of old time
Hooding a sacred rose under the ice cap of the world--
Dreams will to light.
LOLA RIDGE
"Dreams"