Dreams and Imagination

But this invites the occult mind,

The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

[ Socrates speaking :] Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. . . . Like to us. . . . Tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?

What America needs most today is what it once had, but has lost: the lift of a driving dream.

In dreams we all resemble this savage.

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

A person starts dying when they stop dreaming.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

A thought comes when it will, not when I will.

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man's interpretation of his life and struggles.

Sleep knocks on my eyes: they grow heavy. Sleep touches my mouth: it stays open.Truly, he comes to me on soft soles, the dearest of thieves, and steals my thoughts from me

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.

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.

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

Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ Others dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.