Quotes about dreams and aspirations

There are twin Gates of Sleep.

One, they say, is called the Gate of Horn

and it offers easy passage to all true shades.

The other glistens with ivory, radiant, flawless,

but through it the dead send false dreams up toward the sky.

We should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks.

Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.

But who ever does attain to his ideal?

what others consider utopian is for me something that can become reality.

Is it true, or the dream of a lover's desire?

I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

He went in search of that honored kinsman with God knows how heavy a weight of anguish at his heart, for he knew he was about to shatter the day-dream of his uncle's life; and he knew that our dreams are none the less terrible to lose, because they have never been the realities for which we have mistaken them.

The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

What is lost is lost, and why regret a dream I had when I was young just because the universe woke me from it?

She’d collected the dreams like bright beads on a string of nights that wound around her each day, every day until this one. (p173)