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dream quotes

  • There is no woman who does not dream of being dressed in Paris.

    -Anonymous
      Catalogue of the1925 Paris Exhibition. Quoted in Colin McDowell McDowell's Directory of  Twentieth Century Fashion (1984), ch.1.

  • Because thou must not dream, thou needst not then despair!

    - Matthew Arnold
      'Empedocles on Etna', act1, sc.2, l.426.

  • 'Yestreen I dreamed a dolefu'dream; I ken'd here wad be sorrow! I dreamed I pu'd the heather green, On the dowie banks o' Yarrow.' She gaed up yon high, high hill I wat she gaed wi'sorrow An' in the den spied nine dead men, On the dowie houms o' Yarrow.

    -Ballads
    'The Dowie Houms o' Yarrow'.

  • Certes, je sortirai quant a'   moi satisfait D'un monde o  u' l'action n'est pas la soeur du re"  ve. Indeed, for my part, I shall be happy to leave A world where action is not sister to the dream.

    - Charles Baudelaire
      Les Fleurs du mal,'Le Reniement de Saint-Pierre'.

  • And theseven thin ears devoured theseven rank and full ears. And Pharaoh awoke, and, behold, it was a dream.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Genesis 41:7.

  •    And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Joel 2:28.

  • Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

    - Elizabeth Bishop
      'Questions of  Travel'.

  • So I awoke, and behold it was a dream.

    -John Bunyan
      The Pilgrim's Progress, pt.1.

  • In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

    -Thomas Carlyle
    On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic,'The Hero as Man of Letters'.

  • If a work of art is to be truly immortal, it must pass quite beyond the limits of the human world, without any sign of common sense and logic. In this way the work will draw nearer to dream and to the mind of a child.

    - Giorgio de Chirico
    Quoted in Saranne  Alexandrian Surrealist  Art (1970).

  •    A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls

    -Korzeniowski

  • We live, as we dreamalone.

    -Korzeniowski
      Heart of Darkness, pt.1 (first published in Blackwood's Magazine, collected inYouth:  A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, 1902).

  • Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

    - Philip K(indred) Dick
      Title of novel, later the basis for the film Blade Runner.

  •    New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To thinkof 'living'there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live'at Xanadu.

    -Joan Didion
      'Goodbye To  All That', collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).

  • Theyare not long, the days of wine and roses: Out of a misty dream Our path emerges for a while, then closes Within a dream.

    - Ernest Dowson
      'Vitae Summa Brevis'.

  • My whole life Has been a golden dream of love and friendship.

    -John Dryden
      All for Love, or The World Well Lost, act 5.

  • The people's prayer, the glad diviner's theme, The young men's vision and the old men's dream! See Bible106:5.

    -John Dryden
    Absalom and  Achitophel, pt.1, l.238^9.

  • Underneath the Arches, I dream my dreams away, Underneath the Arches, On cobble-stones I lay.

    - Bud stage name of Robert Winthrop Flanagan
      'Underneath the  Arches' (song).

  • Half to forget the wandering and pain, Half to remember days that have gone by, And dream and dream that I am home again!

    -James Elroy Flecker
      'Brumana'.

  • Keep the Home-fires burning, While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of Home. There's a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining; Turn the dark cloud inside out, Till the boys come Home.

    - Lena Guilbert Ford
      'Till the Boys Come Home', a wartime anthem (music by Ivor Novello).

  • Leaving reminds us what we can part with and what we can't, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.

    - Richard Ford
      'An Urge for Going', in Harper's, Feb.

  • I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair, Floating, like a vapour, on the soft summer air.

    - Stephen Collins Foster
      'Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair'.

  • You maydream freely whenyou listen tomusic as well as when you look at painting.When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind.

    - Paul Gauguin
    c.1888  Notes Synthe  tiques, quoted in  J Rewald Gauguin (1938).

  • Cansado, sobre todo, de estar siempre conmigo, de hallarme cada d|a, cuando termina el suen‹  o, all | , donde me encuentre, con las mismas narices y con las mismas piernas. Tired, above all, of being always with myself, of finding myself everyday, when the dream comes to an end, wherever I am, with the same old nose and with the same old legs.

    - Oliverio Girondo
      Persuasio  n de los d|  as,'Cansancio' ('Fatigue').

  •   Never let success hide its emptiness from you; achievement its nothingness; toil its desolation. Keep alivetheincentivetopushonfurther, that pain inthesoul that drives us beyond ourselves. Do not look back, and do not dream about the future either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward, your destiny are here and now.

    - Dag HjalmarAgne Carl Hammarskjo«  ld
    Va«  gmarken (translated by L Sjsy«  berg and W H  Auden as Markings,1964).

  • When I grow too old to dream Your love will live in my heart.

    - Oscar, II Hammerstein
      Song from The Night isYoung (music by Sigmund Romberg).

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

    - Nathaniel Hawthorne
    c.1836  The American Notebooks, ch.1.

  • Se ha hecho para los vivos y no para los muertos el porque   metaf|sico y las reflexiones sobre la vida y la muerte, pero no les hace falta aclarar todo el misterio, les hace falta distraerse y son‹  ar en aclararlo. Metaphysical questions and reflections on lifeand death were created for people alive and not for the dead. However, they do not have to solve all mystery; it is enough for them to create some distraction and to dream that they clarify.

    - Felisberto Herna n dez
      Libro sin tapas,'La piedra filosofal' ('The Philosopher's Stone').

  • What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

    - (James Mercer) Langston Hughes
      'Dream Deferred'. Lorraine Hansberry used the phrase for the title of her play  A Raisin in the Sun (1959).

  • Re"  ver, c'est le bonheur; attendre, c'est la vie. To dream is happiness; to wait is life.

    -Victor Marie Hugo
    ' 1831 Les Feuilles d'automne, no.27,'A mes amis L.B. et S.-B.'.

  • Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.

    - (James Henry) Leigh Hunt
      'Abou Ben  Adhem'.

  • Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

    - Randall Jarrell
      'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner'.

  • From now on you can keep the lot. Take every single thing you've got, Your land, your wealth, your men, your dames, Your dream of independent power, And dear old Konrad Adenauer, And stick them up your Eiffel Tower.

    - SirAntony Rupert Jay
      On France's rejection of British membership of the Common Market, in Time, 8 Feb.

  • I have a dream. I have a dream that my four little children will oneday liveinanationwherethey will not bejudged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

    - Martin LutherJr King
       Washington civil rights rally,15  Jun.

  • I have a dream that one day†the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

    - Martin LutherJr King
      Speech at the Lincoln Memorial, 28  Aug, during the March on Washington.

  • If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise; If you can dreamand not make dreams your master; If you can thinkand not make thoughts your aim, If you can meet withTriumph and Disaster And treat those two imposters just the same.

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      Rewards and Fairies,'If'.

  • All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night inthe dusty recesses of their mindswake inthe day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the dayare dangerous men, for they mayact their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

    -Arabia
      Seven Pillars of  Wisdom, introductory chapter.

  • Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

    - Ursula ne  e Kroeber Le Guin
       Address at Mills College. Collected as'A Left-Handed Commencement  Address' in Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989).

  • Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been, Lives in a dream. Waits at the window, wearing the facethat she keeps in a jar by the door, Who is it for? All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

    -Paul
      'Eleanor Rigby'.

  • Since Life is but a Dream, Why toil to no avail?

    -Li Po
    c.750  'A Homily on Ideals in Life, Uttered in Springtime on Rising from a Drunken Slumber', collected in  A Golden Treasury of Chinese Poetry (translated by John Turner,1967).

  • The Socialists can scheme their schemes and the Liberals can dream their dreams, but we, at least, have work to do.

    - Hugh MacLennan
      Speech at the Conservative Party Conference.

  • We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dream life.

    - David Alan Mamet
      Writing in Restaurants,'A National Dream-Life'.

  • Todayart is moving in a direction of which our fathers would never even have dreamed.We stand before the new pictures as in a dream and we hear the apocalyptic horsemen in the air.

    - Franz Marc
      Subscription prospectus of the Blaue Reiter Almanac,  Jan.

  • I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

    -John Edward Masefield
      'Sea Fever'.

  • Everlasting peace is a dream, and not even a pleasant one; and war is a necessary part of God's arrangement with the world† Without war the world would deteriorate into materialism.

    - Helmuth von, Count Moltke
      Letter to Dr  J K Bluntschi,11 Dec, collected in Helmuth von Moltke as a Correspondent (1893).

  • Patriotism inVietnamtook the communist road because it was the only one available. It had the appeal of a dream, a dream of social justice.

    - Xuan Oanh Nguyen
      In the Eastern Express,17 May.

  • Life is perhaps most wisely regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings, and every day is a life in miniature.

    - Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
      Chu-Yin. Marco Millions, act 2, sc.2.

  • Rise not till noon, if life be but a dream, As Greek and Roman poets have exprest: Add good example to so grave a theme, For he who sleeps the longest lives the best.

    - Matthew Prior
    'Epigram'. (Date unknown. In Matthew Prior: LiteraryWorks, edited by H B Wright and M K Spears, 2 vols,1959.)

  • Il vaut mieux re"  ver sa vie que la vivre, encore que la vivre ce soit encore la re"  ver. It's better to dream your life than to live it, and even though you live it, you will still dream it.

    - Marcel Proust
      Les Plaisirs et les jours.

  • Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

    - Adrienne Cecile Rich
      The Dream of a Common Language,'Origins and History of Consciousness'.

  • Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream; Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright As sunlight on a stream; Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years.

    - Christina Georgina Rossetti
      Goblin Market and Other Poems,'Echo'.

  • The hope I dreamed of was a dream, Was but a dream; and now I wake, Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old, For a dream's sake.

    - Christina Georgina Rossetti
      Goblin Market and Other Poems,'Mirage'.

  • In a dream you are never eighty.

    - Anne ne  e Harvey Sexton
      All My Pretty Ones,'Old'.

  •    You see things, and you say,'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'

    - George Bernard Shaw
    The Serpent

  •    He hath awakened from the dream of life 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
    Adonais, stanza 39.

  • The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Hellas', l.1060^5.

  • I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way, Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring, And gentle odours led my steps astray, Mixed with a sound of water's murmuring Along a shelving bankof turf, which lay Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling Its green arms round the bosom of the stream, But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightst in dream.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'The Question', stanza1.

  • We were now actually in the inner sanctuary of the Nanda Devi Basin, and at each step I experienced that subtlethrill which anyone of imagination must feel when treading hitherto unexplored country† My most blissful dream as a child was to be in some such valley, free to wander where I liked, and discover for myself some hitherto unrevealed glory of Nature. Now the reality was no less wonderful than that half-forgotten dream; and of how many childish fancies can that be said, in this age of disillusionment ?

    - Eric Earle Shipton
      Nanda Devi.

  • Sometimes I dream of revolution, a bloody coup d'e  tat by the second ranktroupes of actors slaughtered by their understudies, magicians sawn in half by indefatigably smiling glamour girls, cricket teams wiped out by marauding bands of twelfth men.

    - SirTom originally Tom Straussler Stoppard
      The Real Inspector Hound.

  • 'Courage!' he said, and pointed toward the land, 'This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.' In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seeme'  d always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Ulysses Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.

    -Tennyson
     Poems,'The Lotos^Eaters', l.1^6.

  • Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At lastfar offat last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

    -Tennyson
      In Memoriam A.H.H., canto 54, l.13^20.

  • I have a terrible lucidityat moments when nature is so beautiful.Iam not conscious of myself any more, and the pictures come to me as if in a dream.

    -Vincent van Gogh
      Letter to his brotherTheo, c.27 Sep.

  • Then, the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, Never before so beautiful, sankdown Into my heart, and held me like a dream.

    -William Wordsworth
    ^1805  The Prelude, bk.2, l.70^4 (published1850).

  • There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore; Turn whereso'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

    -William Wordsworth
    c.1802^1803  'Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', stanza1 (published1807).

  • But there's a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that isgone: The pansyat my feet Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

    -William Wordsworth
    c.1802^1803  'Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', stanza 4 (published1807).

  • If mine had been the painter's hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet's dream.

    -William Wordsworth
      'Elegiac Stanzas: suggested by a picture of Peele Castle in a storm', stanza 4 (published1807).

  • When you are old and greyand full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly how Love fled And paced among the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

    -W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
      'WhenYou Are Old', complete poem. Collected in The Rose (1893).

  • Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair, And dream about the great and their pride; They have spoken against you everywhere, But weigh this song with the great and their pride; I made it out of a mouthful of air, Their children's children shall say they have lied.

    -W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
      'HeThinks ofThose who have Spoken Evil of His Beloved', complete poem. Collected in TheWind Among the Reeds (1899).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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