Skip to content

Dreams Quotes

The word covers two things, the dreams you have asleep and the ones you have about your future, and this page leans towards the first. Shakespeare has by far the most entries, followed by Tennyson, Yeats and Pessoa. If you came for motivational lines about chasing your goals, you will find fewer of those than you might expect.

What you do find is better sourced than most. Dostoyevsky’s The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877) is here, and so is Wittgenstein in Culture and Value (1980): “Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” The line “When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness” is credited to Tecumseh and is marked disputed.

Random quote on Dreams

Most quoted on dreams:

Sleep, rest of nature, O sleep, most gentle of the divinities, peace of the soul, thou at whose presence care disappears, who soothest hearts wearied with daily employments, and makest them strong again for labour!

Ovid

Now, blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.

Miguel de Cervantes El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha) (1605)

In dreams begin responsibilities.

William Butler Yeats epigram to the book Responsibilities (1914)

In blissful dream, in silent night,
There came to me, with magic might,
With magic might, my own sweet love,
Into my little room above.

Heinrich Heine

Some dreams we have are nothing else but dreams,
Unnatural and full of contradictions;
Yet others of our most romantic schemes
Are something more than fictions.

Thomas Hood

Inhale deep like the words of my breath,
I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death

Nas

O sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven
That slid into my soul.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One of the most important ways of understanding the unconscious—indeed, as Freud saw it, the royal road to discovering the nature of its contents—is the dream. And what is a dream but a series of images that tell a story?

Morton Kelsey Myth, History & Faith (1974)

I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books — brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.

James Branch Cabell The Certain Hour (1916)

Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we knew it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.

Ursula K. Le Guin Changing Planes (2003)

How happy he whose toil
Has o'er his languid pow'rless limbs diffus'd
A pleasing lassitude; he not in vain
Invokes the gentle Deity of dreams.
His pow'rs the most voluptuously dissolve
In soft repose; on him the balmy dews
Of Sleep with double nutriment descend.

John Armstrong The Art of Preserving Health (1744)

For is there aught in Sleep can charm the wise?
To lie in dead oblivion, loosing half
The fleeting moments of too short a life—
* * * * * *
Who would in such a gloomy state remain
Longer than Nature craves?

James Thomson

Seraphim,
The lost hosts awaken

James Joyce Pomes Penyeach (1927)

Alice! a childish story take,
And with a gentle hand
Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined
In Memory's mystic band,
Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers
Plucked in a far-off land.

Lewis Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Still believe that ever round you
Spirits float who watch and wait;
Nor forget the twain who found you
Sleeping nigh the Golden Gate.

Walter Besant

If thou wilt close thy drowsy eyes,
My mulberry one, my golden son,
The rose shall sing thee lullabies,
My pretty cosset lambkin!

Eugene Field

All gifts but one the jealous God may keep
From our soul's longing, one he cannot—sleep.
This, though he grudge all other grace to prayer,
This grace his closed hand cannot choose but spare.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

My imagination is surely an aggravation of threats That can come about, ’cause the tongue is mighty powerful And I can name a list of your favorites that probably vouch. Maybe 'cause I'm a dreamer and sleep is the cousin of death.

Kendrick Lamar

On your eyelids crown the god of sleep,
Charming your blood with pleasing heaviness:
Making such difference 'twixt wake and sleep,
As is the difference betwixt day and night,
The hour before the heavenly-harness'd team
Begins his golden progress in the east.

William Shakespeare

Did I dream this belief
Or did I believe this dream?
Now I will find relief
I grieve

Peter Gabriel

Related topics