quotations about dreams & dreaming
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
Why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
"The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?", Nautilus, April 20, 2017
Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Hypnos"
You can't put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get.
MICHAEL PHELPS
Woman's Day, Apr. 1, 2009
Better to dream than to be.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Education of the Stoic
Dreams that are realized become an inspiration for new endeavor. It is in the power to make the dream good that we find the hope of this world.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
He Can Who Thinks He Can
Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
The pillow is a silent sibyl--despise not its oracles.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
The Higher Pantheism
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
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
All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
The Miracle of Right Thought
Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Word for World is Forest
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
Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe.... The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss ... and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange anomalities, weird vegetation, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night.
VICTOR HUGO
Travailleurs de la Mer
Because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I dream, I think myself awake.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
MUHAMMAD ALI
Esquire, Feb. 2012
The dream deceives; it leads to confusions; it is illusory. But it is not erroneous.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Sputnik Sweetheart