Dreams and Imagination

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. ~~ Henry David Thoreau

Three-year-old Gabriel was intently playing when his father began to talk to him. "Shhh, shhh, Daddy," Gabriel said sternly. "I'm playing and I have to listen to my imagination." ~~ Karilee Halo-Shames, RN, Ph.D.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. ~~ Edgar Allan Poe

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. ~~ Joseph Campbell

It was a breeze in the 60s to grow up, compared to [the 90s]… The dream was still there, the no-matter-what-you-could-make-it feeling. Kids today feel, "No matter what, I'm probably not going to make it." ~~ Neil Young

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a waking man. ~~ Pliny the Elder

We have fewer friends than we imagine, but more than we know. ~~ Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream. ~~ Maya Angelou

Yeah, you know people get wrinkled and gray because life beats the hell out of them. If life were all wonderful and every dream came true you wouldn't go gray, know what I mean? ~~ Chris Isaak

I worked hard and made my own way, just as my father had. And just, I'm sure, as he hoped I would. I learned, from observing him, the satisfaction that comes from striving and seeing a dream fulfilled. ~~ Sigourney Weaver

We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine. ~~ Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar. ~~ Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay

Can you imagine what a world it would be if we didn't have a Bob Dylan? It would be awful. ~~ George Harrison

Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream world into reality. ~~ Theodor Reik

Either this life is very dreamlike, or this dream I'm in is very life-like. ~~ Ashleigh Brilliant

Memory feeds imagination. ~~ Amy Tan

Those who lose dreaming are lost. ~~ Australian Aboriginal proverb

If the dreams of any so-called normal man were exposed … there would be no more gravity and dignity left for mankind. ~~ Vera Caspary

There is nothing in the world so attractive as someone who will dream with us, merge their dreams with our own, clarify the path toward the actualization of the dream, and lock their arms into ours while walking the path. ~~ Neil Clark Warren

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth. ~~ Patti Smith

You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus. ~~ Mark Twain

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition -- about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive. ~~ Maya Angelou

I slept and dreamed that life was beauty. I woke -- and found that life was duty. ~~ Ellen Sturgis Hooper

I dream for a living. ~~ Steven Spielberg (see Said Who?)

Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. ~~ Carl Jung

I think there is something more important than believing: Action! The world is full of dreamers; there aren't enough who will move ahead and begin to take concrete steps to actualize their vision. ~~ W. Clement Stone

Your children have a unique opportunity to spend close to fifteen thousand hours before the age of seven doing what they'll dream of being able to do the rest of their lives: playing. Playing is children's work. It is the way they explore the world. ~~ Phil Phillips

Commit yourself to a dream … Nobody who tries to do something great but fails is a total failure. Why? Because he can always rest assured that he succeeded in life's most important battle -- he defeated the fear of trying. ~~ Robert H. Schuller

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination. ~~ Alfred North Whitehead

T

here is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. ~~ Milan Kundera

We live in the present, we dream of the future, but we learn eternal truths from the past. ~~ Madame Chiang Kai-shek

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. ~~ Oscar Wilde

Let us leave pretty women to men without imagination. ~~ Marcel Proust

There is an eternal dispute between those who imagine the world to suit their policy, and those who correct their policy to suit the realities of the world. ~~ Albert Sorel

A hope beyond the shadow of a dream. ~~ John Keats

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. ~~ Marcus Anneus Seneca

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely. ~~ Erma Bombeck

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, to one's affections, and one's inner happiness. ~~ George Sand

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams. ~~ Umberto Eco

A man's life is dyed the color of his imagination. ~~ Unattributed

Imagination was given to us to compensate for what we are not; a sense of humor was provided to console us for what we are. ~~ Mack McGinnis

The American dream is not over. America is an adventure. ~~ Theodore White

To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything. ~~ Anatole France [Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault]

It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else. ~~ Erma Bombeck

Nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen. ~~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion. ~~ Elizabeth Drew

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. ~~ Edgar Allan Poe [A Dream Within a Dream]

If your dreams don't come true, be thankful that neither do your nightmares. ~~ Peter's Almanac

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange. ~~ G. K. Chesteron [The Defendant]

It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit -- enable them to see visions and dream dreams. ~~ Eric Anderson

To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are. ~~ Unattributed

I see nothing wrong with acting out one's dreams, if only to discover that they never had a shred of reality about them. ~~ Amanda Cross [Carolyn Heilbrun]

Both dreams and myths are important communications … If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world. ~~ Erich Fromm

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future. ~~ Charles F. Kettering

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. ~~ Derek Walcott

No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to flee and fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams. ~~ Jesse Jackson

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth. ~~ Jean Giraudoux

hat we remember is what we become. What we have forgotten is more kindly and disturbs only our dreams. We become resemblances of our past. ~~ John Osborne

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. ~~ Wallace Stevens [Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour]

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. ~~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

And close beside me the cat sits purring,
Warming her paws at the cheery gleam;
The flames keep flitting, and flicking, and whirring;
My mind is wrapped in a realm of dream. ~~ Heinrich Heine

The slaughter of innocents is probably a fate that is written into the destiny of places where dreams begin to dry up. ~~ John Denver

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. ~~ Thomas Jefferson

If we lacked imagination enough to foresee something better, life would indeed be a tragedy. ~~ Laurence J. Peter

In a dream you are never eighty. ~~ Anne Sexton [Old]

I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay. ~~ Bob Dylan

I never learned as much in the classroom as I did staring out a window and imagining things. ~~ Robert Redford

We have all got our "good old days" tucked away inside our hearts, and we return to them in dreams like cats to favorite armchairs. ~~ Brian Carter

The possibilities for mobilizing the experience, imaginations, and intelligence of workers, both employed and unemployed, are limitless. ~~ Emlyn Williams

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams. ~~ John Barrymore

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that... ~~ George Carlin

The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now. ~~ Bill Cosby

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams. ~~ Elias Canetti [The Human Province]

Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares. ~~ Peter Ustinov

I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation. ~~ W. Somerset Maugham

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury. ~~ Charlie Chaplin

Imagine meeting your maker and finding out it's Frito-Lay. ~~ George Carlin

Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocals. Nobody wants to read the small print in dreams. ~~ Ann Landers

Dream in a pragmatic way. ~~ Aldous Huxley

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun. ~~ George Scialabba

When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing. ~~ Stephen King [Bag of Bones]

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved. ~~ Iris Murdoch

We must stop talking about the American dream and start listening to the dreams of Americans. ~~ Reubin Askew

To believe in one's dreams is to spend all of one's life asleep. ~~ Chinese proverb

All of us may be surrealists in our dreams, but in our worries we are incorrigibly bourgeois. ~~ Adam Phillips

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream. ~~ Archibald MacLeish

To dream the Impossible Dream

To fight the unbeatable foe

To bear with unbearable sorrow

To run where the brave dare not go. ~~ The Impossible Dream [song, lyrics by Joe Darion]

Have you ever considered what the mere ability to read means? That is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination. ~~ James Russell Lowell

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships. ~~ Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

The years forever fashion new dreams when old ones go. God pity a one-dream man! ~~ Robert Goddard

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. ~~ Thomas Alva Edison

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. ~~ Ernest Hemingway

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination, and unbeatable determination to do the job at hand. ~~ Harry S Truman

Imagination continually frustrates tradition; that is its function. ~~ John Pfeiffer

Ours is a business both strange and unique, a business of starlight and glamour -- one moment a place of dreams, the next of nightmares. ~~ Christopher Lee

People can die of mere imagination. ~~ Geoffrey Chaucer

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster. ~~ Susan Sontag

If you believe, then you hang on. If you believe, it means you've got imagination, you don't need stuff thrown out for you in a blueprint, you don't face facts -- what can stop you? If I don't make it today, I'll come in tomorrow. ~~ Ruth Gordon

I doubt that imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. ~~ Ursula K. Le Guin

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams. ~~ Jimmy Carter

The man who has no imagination has no wings. ~~ Muhammad Ali

Imagination is more important than knowledge. ~~ Albert Einstein

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dreams. ~~ Orson Welles

You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?" ~~ George Bernard Shaw

There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place. ~~ E. B. White

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. ~~ Carl Sagan

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer. ~~ Charles F. Kettering

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. ~~ John Dewey

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment. ~~ Jean Baudrillard

You've got to create a dream. You've got to uphold the dream. If you can't, then... Go back to the factory, or go back to the desk. ~~ Eric Burdon