Kurt Elling Quotes

The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.

Maybe when I was a kid, when you have those crazy dreams about what music is going to be like - a string of No. 1 hits, a limo, and a fairground in your back garden - and then you start as a musician, and you realize very, very quickly, that's not how things work. So I just let go of all that stuff.

The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out. The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

I think dreams can come true, but not necessarily like fairy-tales. It's not always so perfect like that.

The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

The possible ranks higher than the actual.

But my estimates, for instance, based upon book information, were simply ridiculous, fanciful images of African attractions were soon dissipated, anticipated pleasures vanished, and all crude ideas began to resolve themselves into shape.

The interesting thing about life is, there is what you think is going to happen, and what actually happens.

What happens when your dream comes true - when the spotlight is on and then it moves away?

Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.

Everything you can imagine is real.

If you can't imagine it, you sure as hell are never going to see it.

Mind the gap - it's the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is.

To visualize is to see what is not there, what is not real - a dream. To visualize is, in fact, to make visual lies. Visual lies, however, have a way of coming true.

Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.

That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.

The moment you carry out any of your dreams or your fantasies - travel around the world, climbing a high mountain, buying a new house, writing a novel, carrying out a sexual fantasy, traveling to an unknown country - the moment you carry out your dreams, it's always, by definition less perfect and rosy than it had been as a dream. This is the nature of dreams.

But was anything in life, Anne asked herself wearily, like one's imagination of it?

I don;t think there's anything wrong with being a dreamer. There is not. But dreams have ways of turning into nightmares.

Life is not what you expected it to be.

the curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.

Dreams are the seedlings of reality.

Dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice.

People aren't always what you want them to be

To wear dreams on one's feet is to begin to give a reality to one's dreams.