Dreams and Imagination

A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.

The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet’s dream.

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.

He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake … A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offers us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.

A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

We were somewhere around Barstow on theedge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep—that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.

All that we see or seem

No, there’s nothing half so sweet in life

I was the giant great and still

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four.

My soul is an enchanted boat,

The light that never was, on sea or land,

Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country.

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground—not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Democratic nations care but little for whathas been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. . . . Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.

Don't dream your life, but live your dream

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?