Famous Quotes & Sayings

Hermann Hesse

Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night!

Hermann Hesse

You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you're human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.

Hermann Hesse

When a writer receives praise or blame, when he arouses sympathy or is ridiculed, when he is loved or rejected, it is not on the strength of his thoughts and dreams as a whole, but only of that infinitesimal part which has been able to make its way through the narrow channel of language and the equally narrow channel of the reader's understanding.

Hermann Hesse

I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books. I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams -- like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.

Henry Timrod

Each has its lesson; for our dreams in sooth, come they in shape of demons, gods, or elves, are allegories with deep hearts of truth that tell us solemn secrets of ourselves.

Henry Vaughan

And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams Call to the soul when man doth sleep. So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted dreams, And into glory peep.

Henry Van Dyke

We may be able to tell how many stars are in the Milky Way; we may be able to count the petals of every flower, and number the bones of every bird; but unless faith leads us to a deeper understanding, a more reverent comprehension of the significance of the universe, God can be no more pleased with our knowledge than the painter is pleased with the fly which touches his picture with its feelers, and sips the varnish from the surface, and dies without dreaming of the meaning, thought, feeling, embodied in the colors.

Henry Van Dyke

A tear that trembles for a little while Upon the trembling eyelid, till the world Wavers within its circle like a dream, Holds more of meaning in its narrow orb Than all the distant landscape that it blurs.

Henry Van Dyke

Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air; And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair; And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome; But when it comes to living, there is no place like home.

Henry Van Dyke

Love is not getting, but giving. Not a wild dream of pleasure and madness of desire - oh, no - love is not that! It is goodness and honor and peace and pure living - yes, love is that and it is the best thing in the world and the thing that lives the longest....

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Is this is a dream? O, if it be a dream, Let me sleep on, and do not wake me yet!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There are things of which I may not speak; There are dreams that cannot die; There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak, And bring a pallor into the cheek, And a mist before the eye.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Thus thought I, as by night I read Of the great army of the dead, The trenches cold and damp, The starved and frozen camp,-- The wounded from the battle-plain, In dreary hospitals of pain, The cheerless corridors, The cold and stony floors. Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom And flit from room to room. And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls.

Joseph Addison

I believe that everyone, some time or other, dreams that he is reading papers, books, or letters; in which case the invention prompts so readily that the mind is imposed upon, and mistakes its own suggestions for the composition of another.

Joseph Addison

Why will any man be so impertinently officious as to tell me all prospect of a future state is only fancy and delusion? Is there any merit in being the messenger of ill news. If it is a dream, let me enjoy it, since it makes me both the happier and better man.

There is beauty everywhere on earth, but there is greater beauty in those places where one feels that sense of ease which comes from no longer having to put off one’s dreams until some improbable future – a future inexorably shrinking away; where the fear that has pervaded one’s life suddenly vanishes because there is... nothing to be afraid of.

Jose Saramago

Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.

Jose Saramago

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

Jose Saramago

The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.

Jose Saramago

A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo'.

Jose Marti

Day and night I always dream with open eyes." - José Martí

Jose Mourinho

We want to follow a dream, yes it's true, but it's one thing to follow a dream and another to follow an obsession...A dream is more pure than obsession. A dream is about pride.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

The world is the sum-total of our vital possibilities.

Jorge Paulo Lemann

I always say, to have a big dream requires the same effort as having a small dream. Dream big!

Jorja Fox

I have been very fortunate in [the entertainment] business, and I am very grateful for that. I wish the same for everyone out there, especially everyone who dares to dream.

Jorge Amado

He owned a whole world full of memories, of lovely moments relived and happy recollections. I'm not saying he was happy or that he didn't suffer. He suffered very much, but he did not despair; he still drew nourishment from what he had been given. But the sadness never left him. Happiness needs more than memories of the past to feed on; it also needs dreams of the future.

Jorge Luis Borges

I wonder if I have woven through dreams the sexual strife. I don't think so. But after all, my business is to weave dreams. I suppose I may be allowed to choose the material.

Jorge Luis Borges

I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

Jorge Luis Borges

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

Jorge Luis Borges

I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.

Jorge Luis Borges

Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.

Jorge Luis Borges

I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?

Jorge Luis Borges

All writing is dreaming