Dreams and Imagination

Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.

 

I don’t want realism. I want magic!

More things are wrought by prayer

 

It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other 103 noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say, “Behold!” The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion.

Some there be that shadows kiss; Such have but a shadow’s bliss.

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Come, dear children, let us away;

But who can live for long

God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.

Ever let the fancy roam,

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he had imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.

She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro’ the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side. “The curse is come upon me,” cried

 

There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, ’tis for some other. The spirit cannot die; and man, who shall know all and shall have wings.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled—and it sleeps for ever in most historians—there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.