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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:

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 Dostoyevsky The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877)

At the core of all utopian visions lies one of the main structural dysfunctions of the old consciousness: looking to the future for salvation. The only existence the future actually has is as a thought form in your mind, so when you look to the future for salvation, you are unconsciously looking to your own mind for salvation. You are trapped in form, and that is ego.

Eckhart Tolle

And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste
Shall others continue, but never complete.
For none upon earth can achieve his scheme;
The best as the worst are futile here:
We wake at the self-same point of the dream,—
All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.

Victor Hugo

I am weary of planning and toiling
In the crowded hives of men;
Heart weary of building and spoiling
And spoiling and building again;
And I long for the dear old river
Where I dreamed my youth away;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a toiler dies in a day.

John Boyle O'Reilly

O polish'd perturbation! golden care!
That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide
To many a watchful night! sleep with it now!
Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet
As he whose brow with homely biggen bound
Snores out the watch of night.

William Shakespeare

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.

Zhuangzi

Of all the thoughts of God that are
Borne inward unto souls afar,
Along the Psalmist's music deep,
Now tell me if that any is,
For gift or grace, surpassing this—
"He giveth His beloved sleep."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.

Rod Serling

In the broad light of day mathematicians check their equations and proofs,
leaving no stone unturned in their search for rigor.
But at night, under the full moon, they dream.
They float among the stars and wonder at the miracle of the heavens.
They are inspired.
Without dreams there is no art, no mathematics, no life.

Michael Atiyah

No, Ernest, don't talk about action. It is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Oscar Wilde

The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts — Merry meet, merry part, and blessed be.

Starhawk Womanspirit Rising : A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979)

It is a Reasonable presumption that a man who sleeps upon his rights has not got much right.

Charles Bowen, Baron Bowen Ex parte Hall; In re Wood (1883)

I'm more determined than ever that my husband's dream will become a reality.

Coretta Scott King

It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.

Lin Yutang The Importance of Living (1937)

But the dreams of designing diplomats do not always prosper, and we must trust the future.

John Maynard Keynes The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.

Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)

Sleep is when all unsorted stuff comes as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.

William Golding Pincher Martin (1956)

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne The American Notebooks (1835)

She needed more sleep and less aggravation.

Sheri S. Tepper Gibbon's Decline & Fall (1996)

“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”

Dan Simmons The Fall of Hyperion (1990)

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