Quotes About Dreams

No sueño con poseerte. ¿Para qué? Sería traducir a plebeyo mi sueño. Poseer un cuerpo es ser banal. Soñar con poseer un cuerpo es tal vez peor, aunque sea difícil serlo: es soñarse banal, horror supremo.

Some have a great dream in life that they never accomplish. Others have no dream, and likewise never accomplish it.

Whenever my ambition, influenced by my dreams, raised up above the everyday level of my life, so that for a moment I seemed to soar, like a child on a swing, I always – like the child – had to come down to the public garden and face my defeat, with no flags to wave in battle and no sword I was strong enough to unsheath.

Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming. — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics, 2002)

don't insult myself by giving to dreams a value they do not have, apart from that of being my personal theatre, just as I do not call wine (from which I still do not abstain) 'food' or 'one of life's necessities'.

I dream because I dream, but I don't insult myself by giving to dreams a value they do not have, apart from that of being my personal theatre, just as I do not call wine (from which I still do not abstain) 'food' or 'one of life's necessities'.

No he hecho más que soñar. Ése ha sido y sigue siendo, incluso, el sentido de mi vida. Nunca he tenido otra preocupación verdadera que no fuese mi vida interior. Los mayores dolores de mi vida se desvanecen cuando, al abrir la ventana hacia la calle de mis sueños, consigo enajenarme en la visión de su movimiento.

satisfied with dreams only when I'm not dreaming, satisfied with the world only when I'm dreaming far away from it. A swinging pendulum, back and forth, forever moving to arrive nowhere, eternally captive to the twin fatality of a centre and a useless motion.

To imagine, without being, is the throne. To desire, without wanting, is the crown. We have what we renounce, for we conserve it eternally intact in our dreams, by the light of the sun that isn't, or of the moon that cannot be.

Love is a mysticism that wants to be put into practice, an impossibility that according to our dreams should be possible.

In the plausible intimacy of approaching evening, as I stand waiting for the stars to begin at the window of this fourth floor room that looks out on the infinite, my dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible.

109 [126] Even my dreams turn on me. I achieve such a degree of lucidity in them that I perceived as real everything I dreamed. So, because I dreamed it, was everything I valued just a waste of time?

When it comes to dreams, I'm no different from the errand boy and the seamstress. The only thing that distinguishes me from them is that I can write. Yes, that's an activity, a real fact about myself that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I'm just the same.

Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn't be able to. An assistant bookkeeper can imagine himself to be a Roman emperor; the King of England can't do that, because the King of England has lost the ability in his dreams to be any other king than the one he is. His reality does not allow him to exist.

I know of no pleasure like that of books, yet I read very little. Books are the entryway to dreams, but people at ease in life don't need such introductions to enter into conversation with dreams. I could never read a book and give myself over to it; always, with each step, the commentary of my intellect or my imagination interrupts the narrative sequence. After some minutes I am the one who writes and the writing is nowhere to be seen.

72] 381 Down the steps of my dreams and my weariness, descend from your unreality, descend and be my substitute for the world.

Sólo sabe escribir quien es capaz de ver sus propios sueños con nitidez (y es así) o ver en sueños la vida, verla de forma inmaterial, haciéndole fotos con la máquina del devaneo, sobre la cual los rayos de lo pesado, de lo útil y de lo restringido no pueden actuar, revelándose en negro la placa espiritual.

Ah, no hay nostalgia más dolorosa que la de las cosas que nunca han sucedido!

Let us be as chaste as dead lips, as pure as dreamed bodies, as resigned to being both these things as mad little nuns …

And I who am saying all this – why am I writing this book? Because I realize it's imperfect. Dreamed, it would be perfection; written, it becomes imperfect; that's why I'm writing it. And above all else, because I advocate uselessness, absurdity, – I write this book to lie to myself, to be unfaithful to my own theory.

El mundo es para quien nace para conquistarlo y no para quien sueña que puede conquistarlo, aunque tenga razón.

Yet dreamed landscapes are merely the smoke from known landscapes and the tedium of dreaming them is almost as great as the tedium of looking at the world. And hovering distractedly above all this, like a vast blue sky, the horror of living.

As with all tragedies, the real tragedy of my life is just an irony of Fate. I reject life because it is a prison sentence, I reject dreams as being a vulgar form of escape. Yet I live the most sordid and ordinary of real lives and the most intense and constant of dream lives. I'm like a slave who gets drunk during his rest hour - two miseries inhabiting one body.

But I also see that in order to flee from all this I must either master it or repudiate it. I do not master it because I cannot rise above reality and I do not repudiate it because, whatever I may dream, I always remain exactly where I am.