fantasies quotes

Ah! si l'on o"  tait les chime'  res aux hommes, quel plaisir leur resterait? Oh! If man were robbed of his fantasies, what pleasure would be left him?

- Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
  Dialogue des morts.

Do you know out of what the German Empire arose? Out of dreams, songs, fantasies and black-red-gold ribbons† Bismarck merely shook the tree that fantasies had planted.

-Theodor Herzl
Quoted in Carl E Schorske Fin-de-Sie' c le Vienna (1961), p.165.

In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

- Ursula ne  e Kroeber Le Guin
The Lathe of Heaven, ch.10.

A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues, that syllable men's names On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.

-John Milton
  Comus,  A Mask, l.204^8.

And besides, Mrs Forthby in the flesh was a different kettle of fish to Mrs Forthby in his fantasies. In the latter she had a multitude of perverse inclinations, which corresponded exactly with his own unfortunate requirements, while possessing a discretion that would have done credit to aTrappist nun. In the flesh she was disappointingly different.

-Tom (Thomas Ridley) Sharpe
  Blott on the Landscape, ch.3.

Why do so many talented economic theorists believe and teach elegant fantasies so obviously refutable by plainly evident facts?

-James Tobin
  'An Old Keynesian Counterattacks', in the Eastern EconomicJournal, Fall issue.