“In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.”
Carl Jung
“Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren’t up to the job.”
Alex Garland
“For often, when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.”
Aristotle
“Dreams are the touchstones of our character.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.”
Erich Fromm
“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
Virginia Woolf
“Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.”
H.F. Hedge
“Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.”
Henri Amiel
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
Carl Jung
“In dreams begin responsibilities.”
William Butler Yeats
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
Sigmund Freud
“A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.”
John Barrymore
“It may be that those who do most, dream most.”
Stephen Butler Leacock
“Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?”
Havelock Ellis
“Dream in a pragmatic way.”
Aldous Huxley
“They say dreams are the windows of the soul–take a peek and you can see the inner workings, the nuts and bolts.”
Henry Bromel
“The best reason for having dreams is that in dreams no reasons are necessary.”
Ashleigh Brilliant
“I don’t dream at night, I dream all day; I dream for a living.”
Steven Spielberg
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”
T.E. Lawrence
“All men whilst they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.”
Plutarch
“I sleep among ravishing illusions and wake to their burden.”
Virginia Woolf
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”
Edgar Allen Poe
“Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.”
Edgar Cayce
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Dreams say what they mean, but they don’t say it in daytime language.”
Gail Godwin
“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Oscar Wilde
“If one advances confidently in the direction of one’s dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Henry David Thoreau
“They say dreams are the windows of the soul—take a peek and you can see the inner workings, the nuts and bolts.”
Henry Bromel
Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.
Victor Hugo
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
Sigmund Freud
“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.”
Edgar Allan Poe
“All men of action are dreamers.”
James Huneker
“The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.”
Swami Vivekanada
“The center of every man’s existence is a dream.”
G.K. Chesterton
“The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment, when you are between asleep and awake, when you don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened.”
James Arthur Baldwin
“Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.”
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno
“Pause now to ask yourself the following question: ‘Am I dreaming or awake, right now?’ Be serious, really try to answer the question to the best of your ability and be ready to justify your answer.”
Stephen LaBerge
“All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.”
Elias Canetti
“Dreams are more real than reality itself, they’re closer to the self.”
Gao Xingjian
“Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?”
Alfred Lord Tennyson
“Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams.”
William Wordsworth
“All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.”
Jack Kerouac
“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
Anais Nin
“Without a dream you’ll not get anywhere.”
Kofi Annan
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.”
Henry David Thoreau
What’s your favorite quote about dreams and reality? Have any others you’d add to the collection? Comment below!
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