Michel de Montaigne Quotes

Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream

Do you ever rub your eyes and suddenly find you're awake and not asleep, as you'd grown to suspect you were?

Sometimes we don't know we're dreaming; we can't even fathom that we're asleep.

You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do you think we can go on like this forever?

The most important dreams occur while people are fully awake.

How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.

But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.

There is but one world common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep, each turns away into a world of his own.

The more I see, the less I know.

I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure that I was dreaming.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

If your eyes weren't open, you wouldn't know the difference between dreaming and waking.

Rose once told me about this poem she’d read. There was this line, ‘If your eyes weren’t open, you wouldn’t know the difference between dreaming and waking.’ You know what I’m afraid of? That someday, even with my eyes open, I still won’t know.

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

My whole life, people have been like, 'I don't know if you're playing or serious.'

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

Every day after I wake up, I think, 'Wait... this can't be real; I'm still going to wake up.'

There are many things that I don't understand.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.

I can't remember any dreams in my life. There's so much strange in real life that it often seems like a dream.

We just do not know what is normal.