If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions, and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.
Too often, we decide to follow a path that is not really our own, one that others have set for us. We forget that...in both cases we will pass through both difficult and happy moments. But when we are living our dream, the difficulties we encounter make sense.
Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse. Untrammeled reasoning is the indulgence of the philosopher, of the dreamer of sweet dreams.
Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight. Mercutio: And so did I. Romeo: Well, what was yours? Mercutio: That dreamers often lie. Romeo: In bed asleep while they do dream things true.
If a human being dreams a great dream, dares to love somebody; if a human being dares to be Martin King, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Theresa, or Malcolm X; if a human being dares to be bigger than the condition into which she or he was born-it means so can you. And so you can try to stretch, stretch, stretch yourself so you can internalize, 'Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me.' That's one thing I'm learning.
When I was 40, I wrote my first book, The Pilgrimage, and I said to myself, "why did it take so long for me to write this book?" Because my dream, since I was 10 years old, was to be a writer. I said, I have to revisit my life using a metaphor, and the metaphor was basically this boy that has a dream and has to go far away to realize that his dream is close to him.
Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee, from the hill-top looking down; And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Sto
Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented.
The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
I hate this world, this dream, this horrible nightmare, with its churches and chicaneries, its books and blackguardisms, its fair faces and false hearts, its howling righteousness on the surface and utter hollowness beneath and, above all, its sanctified shopkeeping!
We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.