Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.

For me they are no different, reality and dreams.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

Living most of the time in a world created mostly in one's head, does not make for an easy passage in the real world.

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

I always had an awful lot going on in my head, always telling myself stories, very vivid imagination.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

There are two worlds we live in: a material world, bound by the laws of physics, and the world inside our mind, which is just as important.

I'm not interested in observed reality.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

Everything is only a dream.

My life exists in an imagined reality.

I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, "intimations of immortality.

So maybe it wasn't the fairy tale. But those stories weren't real anyway. Mine were.

There are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream.

I think reality is over-rated

Don't ask me about this building or that one, don't look at what I do, see what I see.