"Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance,..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth.
More by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.”
“I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.”
“In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.”
More on Dreams
“I've always just wished that maybe someday people would care about the words that I wrote.”
“No lower can a man descend than to interpret his dreams into gold and silver.”
“I'd never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn't meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.”
More on Self Knowledge
“I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.”
“All ages have said and repeated that one should strive to know one's self. This is a strange demand which no one up to now has measured up to and, strictly considered, no one should. With all their study and effort, people are directed to what is outside, to the world about them, and they are kept busy coming to know this and to master it to the extent that their purposes require. . . . How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for.”
“Our shortcomings are the eyes with which we see the ideal.”