quotations about dreams & dreaming
I dream, therefore I exist.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
A Madman's Defense
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
If you're smart, then your dreams evolve, too.
MARIO BATALI
Esquire, Jun. 2004
The dreams of golden glory in the future will not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty deeds we make them come true.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
speech at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Eleonora"
Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass, through many doors to the one door of all.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
You can't put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get.
MICHAEL PHELPS
Woman's Day, Apr. 1, 2009
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
Dreams are pegs for Superstition and Romance to hang their cloaks upon.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Dreams are symbolic in order that they cannot be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown.
CARL JUNG
Psychology of the Unconscious
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
The Higher Pantheism
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
White Nights
If you do not fear God, then fear your dreams, because they're how He talks to you.
TIM LEBBON
Face
One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook J", The Waste Books
People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Winter of Our Discontent
The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.
CARL JUNG
The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man
Those dreams that on the silent night intrude, and with false flitting shapes our minds delude ... are mere productions of the brain. And fools consult interpreters in vain.
JONATHAN SWIFT
On Dreams
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
Dream different dreams while on the same bed.
CHINESE PROVERB
Hear in a realm of wordless dreams--
That inner life which knows and thinks;
My thirsty spirit comes and drinks
The petal dew of golden streams;
Where death is less than what it seems,
And life is subtler than the Sphinx.
HENRY ABBEY
"May Dreams"