Dream Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.

I went to New York. I had a dream. I wanted to be a big star. I didn't know anybody. I wanted to dance. I wanted to sing. I wanted to do all those things. I wanted to make people happy. I wanted to be famous. I wanted everybody to love me. I wanted to be a star. I worked really hard and my dream came true.

We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.

This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding— it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.

William Faulkner

I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream...he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream — a dream yet unfulfilled.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have a great dream. It started way back in 1776, and God grant that America will be true to her dream.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.

William Shakespeare

The dreamer must contaminate the others by his dream, he must make them fall into it

Jean-Paul Sartre

For myself, I declare I don't know anything about it. But the sight of the stars always makes me dream (usually paraphrased as For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream).

Vincent van Gogh

Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream? Bowed to the earth with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly to and fro. Man's little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.

I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized

William Faulkner

The grass so little has to do,—
A sphere of simple green,
With only butterflies to brood,
And bees to entertain, And stir all day to pretty tunes
The breezes fetch along,
And hold the sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything; And thread the dews all night, like pearls,
And make itself so fine,-
A duchess were too common
For such a noticing. And even when it dies, to pass
In odors so divine,
As lowly spices gone to sleep,
Or amulets of pine. And then to dwell in sovereign barns,
And dream the days away,—
The grass so little has to do,
I wish I were a hay!

Emily Dickinson

There's a reason why so many who marched that day, and in the days to come, were young — for the young are unconstrained by habits of fear, unconstrained by the conventions of what is. They dared to dream differently, to imagine something better. And I am convinced that same imagination, the same hunger of purpose stirs in this generation. We might not face the same dangers of 1963, but the fierce urgency of now remains. We may never duplicate the swelling crowds and dazzling procession of that day so long ago — no one can match King's brilliance — but the same flame that lit the heart of all who are willing to take a first step for justice, I know that flame remains.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe

Dream analysis stands or falls with [the hypothesis of the unconscious]. Without it the dream appears to be merely a freak of nature, a meaningless conglomerate of memory-fragments left over from the happenings of the day.

We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.

It is also possible within this lifetime to enhance the power of the mind, enabling one to reaccess memories from previous lives. Such recollection tends to be more accessible during meditative experiences in the dream state. Once one has accessed memories of previous lives in the dream state, one gradually recalls them in the waking state.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.

Charles Dickens

Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move — which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

William Faulkner

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

William Shakespeare