Dreams quotes

“Hitch your wagon to a star.”

High aims can give ordinary effort direction, provided aspiration remains connected to the work needed to move toward it.

Source note: Essay “Civilization”; Emerson uses the compact image to connect high aspiration with directed effort.

“What is now proved was once only imagined.”

Blake’s proverb compresses a recurring imaginative pattern: possibilities can exist first as conceived ideas before later work, discovery or demonstration makes some of them real or provable.

Source note: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell,” represented by Project Gutenberg #45315 at printed page 16. Gutenberg regularizes the line to “imagined”; Blake’s engraved text is often transcribed with historical spelling and punctuation. The proverb is part of Blake’s deliberately paradoxical infernal-wisdom sequence, not a literal claim that every imagined thing will eventually be proved.

“If you can dream—and not make dreams your master.”

Ambition is useful when it guides action without becoming fantasy detached from judgment and work.

Source note: Poem “If—,” second stanza; the speaker treats dreams as useful aims that must not become masters.

“Thy breath comes to me whispering an impossible hope.”

Longing for what seems beyond reach still carries a form of hope, even while the speaker openly recognizes distance, limitation and uncertainty.

Source note: The Gardener, poem 5, translated by Tagore from Bengali; Project Gutenberg #6686. The poem repeatedly addresses the “Great Beyond” and “Far-to-seek,” so the hope is lyrical longing rather than a factual prediction.

“Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.”

Ambitious ideals can shape development when they influence what a person practices and pursues.

Source note: As a Man Thinketh, “Visions and Ideals.”

“The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream.”

Large achievements begin before they are visible, as imagined possibilities that must survive long enough to become plans and sustained effort.

Source note: As a Man Thinketh, chapter “Visions and Ideals”; Allen follows with natural images of the oak in the acorn and the bird in the egg.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

The line contrasts difficult circumstances with the direction of attention, leaving room for aspiration without denying hardship.

Source note: Act 3.

“The most beautiful world is always entered through the imagination.”

Imagination expands experience beyond immediate physical access, making it possible to enter worlds built from memory, language, thought, and possibility.

Source note: The World I Live In, essay on imagination and dreams; Keller describes imagination as a genuine mode of access to experience.

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.”

Real love asks for repeated effort, patience, and inconvenience, unlike imagined love that can remain noble without enduring another person’s needs.

Source note: The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zossima’s response in the chapter “A Lady of Little Faith.”

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

The absurd boast celebrates imaginative flexibility and the ability to entertain possibilities before demanding immediate proof.

Source note: Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5.

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”

Vision matters most when it changes direction and conduct; imagination becomes useful when a person begins to live toward it.

Source note: Walden, Conclusion; Thoreau urges readers to move deliberately toward the life they have imagined.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

The line emphasizes impermanence and the dreamlike brevity of human life.

Source note: Act 4, Scene 1.

“Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart.”

Sustained ideals can organize attention and effort, giving a person a picture of the kind of life or work they intend to build.

Source note: As a Man Thinketh, chapter “Visions and Ideals”; this is an excerpt from Allen’s longer exhortation to remain true to constructive ideals.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The line warns against treating one explanatory framework as large enough to contain every possible fact or experience.

Source note: Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5.

“his quick imagination transfigured the hard, bare facts of life into new and living dreams.”

Keller praises historian J. R. Green for turning difficult historical facts into vivid narrative through imaginative perception rather than treating facts as lifeless material.

Source note: Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. Keller is describing J. R. Green after reading his biography; the sentence is her characterization of his historical imagination.

“Riches I hold in light esteem, And Love I laugh to scorn; And lust of fame was but a dream, That vanished with the morn.”

The speaker strips wealth, romantic attachment and fame of ultimate authority in order to define freedom through an inwardly independent stance.

Source note: “The Old Stoic,” in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; Project Gutenberg #1019. The poem uses a deliberately severe persona and should not be treated as a complete ethical system.

“I do live in a beautiful dream; but that dream is the actual, the present,—not cold, but warm; not bare, but furnished with a thousand blessings.”

Her optimism is located in attention to the actual present and the blessings she perceives there, not in denial of present reality.

Source note: Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. Keller immediately goes on to reject optimism that ignores evil or suffering.

“If we would make our lives worthy of us, grand and noble, solid and impregnable, we must forsake air-castles of dreaming for strongholds of doing.”

Aspiration has to become action before it can shape a life; Jordan contrasts imagined achievement with concrete work toward a chosen purpose.

Source note: The Power of Truth, “People Who Live in Air-Castles.” The military imagery is metaphorical and belongs to a critique of substituting fantasy for execution.

“A man begins to deteriorate, to go toward failure, not when he loses all of his material possessions, not when he fails in his undertakings, but when he loses faith in himself, in his ability to make his dreams come true.”

Material loss and failed attempts are separated from the deeper danger of abandoning personal agency; the sentence treats continued self-belief as a resource for beginning again.

Source note: The Victorious Attitude; this sentence appears in Marden’s sustained argument that loss of self-faith is more damaging than the loss of possessions or an individual undertaking.

“I believe in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”

Liberty is described in civic, bodily and spiritual terms, joining political rights with the ordinary freedom to live without racial restriction.

Source note: Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, “Credo,” originally published in 1920. Project Gutenberg #15210. The sentence continues with freedom of association, movement, thought, dream and work “uncursed by color.”