Quotes about dreams and aspirations

When you're a slave you dream / of either owning slaves or freeing them.

Dreams soon assume substance

Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say. (p164)

"I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans."

Always remember that the only riches we possess are the dreams we have as children. They are the fuel of our lives, the only force that pushes us to keep on going even when things have gone all wrong.

You have an interesting history. Now people can generally be classified in to two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. You clearly belong to the latter. Your fate is and will always be the fate of dreamers.

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to live somewhere with a garden. I’ll be old but skilled enough to still have some consultancy work to pay for the space to grow real food. Hands in the dirt again. Doing something real. No people around. Yeah, that’s the dream. Strange how the things we rail against and hate in our youth can be the things we crave as we get older.

The end of the world turned out to be something I preferred to fantasize about rather than experience.

“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”

We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.

There is no way to get your health back. You live on memories of what was and fantasies about what might have been. Both can be deadly to the man who loses sight of the demarcation between them and reality.