Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true. When will you realize... Vienna waits for you.

Nothing seems to come up to your expectations. But nothing I had heard about Hollywood was enough.

That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

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.

Hope is in some respects a thing more brilliant, more vivifying, than fruition. What we have looked forward to with eager and earnest aspiration is never in all respects equal to the picture we had formed of it. The very uncertainty enhances the enjoyment.

The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had for it.

Danny Williams broke my dream. Iron Mike, for me, was the dream. For many years, I would see Tyson and say, 'Mike, I want to fight you.' He was on his way back, and we were making conversation about a fight between me and him. So I was very surprised and disappointed when he lost.

When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.

It is hard when you think you can do better, but things just aren't working out.

Things don't always work out as you want them to.

'Twas but a dream, yet by my heart I knew, Which still was panting, part of it was true: Oh how I strove the rest to have believed; Ashamed and angry to be undeceived!

Some worry endlessly over missions that were missed, or marriages that did not turn out, or babies that did not arrive, or children that seem lost, or dreams unfulfilled, or because age limits what they can do. I do not think it pleases the Lord when we worry because we think we never do enough or that what we do is never good enough....Some needlessly carry a heavy burden of guilt which could be removed through confession and repentance.

Hope is a dream deferred.

Babies are unreasonable; they expect far too much of existence. Each new generation that comes takes one look at the world, thinks wildly, "Is this all they've done to it?" and bursts into tears.

Nothing is harder on the soul, than the smell of dreams, while they're evaporating.

I obviously hoped that everything that I found would make a difference. It ended up being way behind my wildest dreams.

But you built me dreams instead.

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

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, - attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune.

I do not dwell on dreams I know how soon a dream becomes an expectation How can I have expectations? Look at me, No, Captain, Look at me, Look at me!

You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.

The course of our lives follows ancient and immutable laws, with an ancient, changeless rhythm. Dreams never come true, and the instant they are shattered, we realize how the greatest joys of life lie beyond the realm of reality. The instant they are shattered we are sick with longing for the days when they flamed within us. Our fate spends itself in this succession of hope and nostalgia.