Tao Te Ching
Dream
Dreams may be a portal, a doorway into a consciousness beyond our struggles for survival, our instinctual influences, our goal-oriented striving. Though under-appreciated with a bad reputation and normally disregarded, dreams may be our most personal and insightful teachers and inspiration out of status quo games and herd-instinct ways of living our lives.
Quotes (128)
“Think this way about our fleeting world: a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; a flash of lightening in a summer cloud; a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
“Creatures of a day! What is anyone? What is anyone not? A dream of a shadow is our mortal being. But when there comes to men a gleam of splendor given of heaven, then rests on them a light of glory and blessed are their days.”
“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?”
“Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly. When he woke up he wondered if was Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly or now a butterfly dreaming it was Chuang Tzu.”
“Is our ‘reality’ not as permanent as we think but just a fleeting thought, a dream?”
“Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this 'reality' as you view your dreams.”
“All form, therefore, is like a dream… The body, in this way, has no existence; What, therefore, is male and what is female?”
“This floating life is like a dream and time itself a traveling guest of the centuries.”
“Dreams are the wanderings of spirit through all nine Heavens and all the nine Earths.”
“experience the absence of conditioned mind and observe that all phenomena are like dreams… enter into the uncontrived, uncluttered ocean of true nature.”
“The chilled crane in its nest in the clouds has not yet been aroused from its dreams.”
“The teaching's voice is total silence amid the ringing wind chimes. The moon hangs in the old pine tree, cold in the falling night.”
“When we asked our school teacher why he took naps, he said 'Like Confucius who dreamed about ancient sages, I go to dreamland and meet them.' When we took naps however he would get angry so we told him that we also went to meet Confucius and the sages. When he challenged us asking what they said, one of us told him, 'We asked them if our schoolmaster met them every afternoon but they said they had never met any such fellow.'”
“Those who stay asleep will watch their life drift past them like a dream, and the traces of their memory will fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.”
“Like a dream, our actions seem to not be very meaningful or important; but, they bring about all the variety of happiness and suffering.”
“Authentic presence may have a dream-like quality but it is not dreaming or tied to any purpose but founded on the recognition of reality developing from acceptance and appreciation.”
“Trying to get rid of habits that derive from attachment to form without having seen into your own nature is like trying to get rid of a dream while asleep... It doesn't matter how much you search for something in a dream, you will never find it.”
“Lost in elegant dalliance
And love-talk, we in the Boudoir of Dreams scoff at grim ascetics.”
“Dreams are true interpreters of our inclinations, but there is art required to sort and understand them.”
“Enthusiasm is love and dreams of a beautiful life, due to which we are enabled to become better”
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
“I find not a single property which with certainty separates the waking state from the dream. How can you be certain that your whole life is not a dream?”
“When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive. I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.
A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of ancient warriors.”
“Let us not dream that reason can ever be popular. Passions and emotions may be made popular, but reason remains ever the property of the few.”
“Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.”
“Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.”
“The more clearly you become conscious of the frailty, vanity, and dream-like quality of all things, the more clearly will you also become conscious of the eternity of your own inner being”
“Life and dreams are leaves of the same book... there is no distinct difference in their nature, and we are forced to concede to the poets that life is a long dram.”
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream...
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expired before;
Darkness had no need of air from them --- She was the Universe.”
“Like day she came, making the night a dream
To move, as one between desire and shame
Thou comest from the realm without a name.”
“Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be... We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
“if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams… In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
“Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light
and of every moment of your life”
“Everybody lies...every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.”
“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
“I was completely ignorant of the poetry of Poe; it is admirable, it is poetry itself, the dream, and how one feels that you have translated its soul! I knew only Poe's prose, which I had read and admired very young before I had heard it spoken of, but how the poems complete and express the man he was.”
“To dream of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness.”
“They've promised that dreams can come true - but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams, too.”
“Dreams show a special tendency to reduce two opposites to a unity or to represent them as one thing.”
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
“Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.”
“The dream is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself.”
“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”
“The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.”
“You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.”
“If you can dream—and not make dreams your master… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it”
“I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
“We know that our dreams are not realizable; but it is useful to have dreams in order to see them come to naught and to learn by their failure.”
“Dreams are the guiding words, the speech of the soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me.”
“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-conscious may extend... All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal”
“That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.”
“I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.”
“There is no possibility of remembering what has been found and understood… It disappears as a dream disappears. Perhaps it is all nothing but a dream.”
“I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”
“You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams and it is well you should.”
“When shall I at last retire into solitude alone, without companions, without joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream?”
“Throughout my life dreams have always been infallible guides. All the problems tormenting my waking mind, twining and intertwining in a hopeless effort to discover a simple, certain solution, have been refined in my dreams. They throw off all superfluity, are reduced to exceedingly simple essence, and this essence is liberated.”
“it is the human being's capacity for dreaming, his unwillingness to accept the gray wall of facts as his prison, his power of ... sallying forth to seek the adventure of the unknown and unrealized, that is the ticket to his redemption.”
“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun?... Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”
“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? … Or does it explode?”
“Americans are bred like stuffed geese – to be consumers, not human beings. The moment they stop consuming and buying, the frog-skin world has no more use for them. They have become frogs themselves… this is the real world, not the Green Frog Skin World. That’s only a bad dream, a streamlined, smog-filled nightmare.”
“Artists are the Indians of the white world. They are called dreamers who live in the clouds… I tell you this is the real world, not the Green Frog Skin World. That’s only a bad dream, a streamlined, smog-filled nightmare.”
“Myths and dreams come from the same place… You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight.”
“They give up the dream of what may lie ahead on the heights of tomorrow for a perpetual nightmare - an endless succession of days fearing the loss of a tenuous security.”
“The mythical animals cataloged in the bestiaries of the world seem, at a casual glance, nothing but exotic nonsense... they are in fact like dreams, and not necessarily bad ones, we may have a hard time doing without them.”
“My ultimate dream is to sow seeds in the desert. To revegetate the deserts is to sow seed in people's hearts.”
“The human dream is to want something or someone to save us... If there's anything to learn here, you have to learn it by yourself.”
“Buddhism begins with a man who shook off the daze, the doze, the dream-like vagaries of ordinary awareness. It begins with a man who woke up.”
“Like dew I was born
Like dew I vanish
..and all that I have ever done
Is but a dream
Within a dream”
“sweet Buddha…I always did suspect that life was a dream, now I am assured by the most brilliant man who ever lived that it is indeed so”
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
“If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer.”
“To make a great dream come true, the first requirement is a great capacity to dream; the second is persistence.”
“The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.”
“The Outsider has his proper place in the Order of Society, as the impractical dreamer.”
“It's a Barnum and Baily world, just as phony as it can be. But it wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me.”
“Losing consciousness in digital dreams
Ignoring life caught up in schemes
Time to come on back home
And start being alone.”
“Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.”
“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”
“The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.”
“The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
“The past is fiction, the future a dream. We are living on the edge of a razor.”
“Whatever we experience in our life – pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness… or whatever – is just purely memories… a phantom… things have a dreamlike quality.”
“The shadows of dreams are reality. Dreams produce reality; reality produces dreams.”
“The first expression of compassion is to experience whatever occurs in our life as dreamlike, a phantom, just purely memories.”
“And if my thought-dreams could be seen... they'd probably put my head in a guillotine.”
“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time”
“Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us.”
“everybody is living a totally wasted life… a sham, living in a dream … we are asleep never really using our senses”
“So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?”
“If you dream that you are flying and continue to believe that you can fly even after you wake up, that becomes a problem.”
“It's as important to know how to give up on dreams and ambitions as it is to know how to generate them.”
“If you can recognize while caught up in a dream that you're only dreaming, you can do anything you like within the dream... Most people go through waking life caught up in the same delusions of limitation and entrapment they experience in their dreams.”
“I saw beyond any doubt that luminous emptiness is within each one of us... transitory dream people who suffer because they do not know that they are in a dream, and do not know that liberation is waking up to the dream as a dream.”
“In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.”
“All humans live inside the dreams of dead people… born into a world shaped by the myths of their ancestors, none of them ever really breaks free”
“This is the dark side of the ‘American dream.’ We blame the poor, accusing them of being poor because they do not work hard enough. Yet for the most part, the poor have less because the rich have taken more.”
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