Top 100 Waking Life Quotes
#1. Doing a story about my mundane, waking life, how much I don't like my job, or breaking up with someone, I don't think so. Those stories don't interest me that much as a general thing.
Jim Woodring
#2. Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.
George Santayana
#3. As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated itself from needful involvement in its subconscious life.
Marshall McLuhan
#4. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.
C.S. Lewis
#5. I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?
Henry David Thoreau
#6. But our waking life, and our growing years, were for the most part spent in the kitchen, and until we married, or ran away, it was the common room we shared.
Laurie Lee
#7. God does not deal directly with man: it is by means of spirits that all the intercourse and communication of gods with men, both in waking life and in sleep, is carried on.
Socrates
#8. though I thought of him often, though he appeared in dreams from which I woke more excited than I was by anything in my waking life, I didn't regret what I had done. I had missed him, but more than missing him I had been relieved that he was gone.
Garth Greenwell
#9. As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.
Alice Hoffman
#10. I remembered a few things about waking. I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away.
Alex Garland
#11. Most people are either sleep walking through their waking life or wake walking through their sleeping life. either way they're not getting much out of it.
Waking Life
#12. The human soul, provided it is pure and strong enough, can contact the unseen in waking life as well as in dreams: all that is required is withdrawal of the soul from the tumult of sensory life.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#13. We imagine that waking-life is real and that dream-life is unreal, but there does not seem to be any evidence for this belief.
Wei Wu Wei
#14. People who pay attention to their lives, watch for clues from their dreams, and then make adjustments in waking life based on the information in dreams, can follow the highest path in the direction that their lives are ultimately meant to go.
Teresa DeCicco
#15. It is obviously possible that what we call waking life may only be an unusual and persistent nightmare.
Bertrand Russell
#16. When darkness fell, he told me to close my eyes and dream, for in my dreams I would find another world, and in my waking life I would soon enough find such a world as well ...
Alice Hoffman
#17. By exposing the hidden dream-thoughts, we have confirmed in general that the dream does continue the motivation and interests of waking life, for dream-thoughts are engaged only with what seems to be important and of great interest to us.
Sigmund Freud
#18. They take little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in death-like sleep." "Then
Robert E. Howard
#19. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
William Golding
#20. There are nights when dreams are so vivid it's impossible to believe that they aren't really a part of your waking life. Your
Leigh Raines
#21. Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life.
Sigmund Freud
#22. Caldwell speaks in the dry, inflectionless tone of a lecturer, but her expression hardens as she stares down at the thing that is both her nemesis and the focal point of her waking life. "If
M.R. Carey
#23. Our dreams are firsthand creations, rather than residues of waking life. We have the capacity for infinite creativity; at least while dreaming, we partake of the power of the Spirit, the infinite Godhead that creates the cosmos.
Jackie Gleason
#24. Dreams and waking life are both the same kinds of things. The difference is that dreaming is perceiving free of external constraints, whereas perceiving otherwise is dreaming true. Meaning what you dream about actually happens.
Stephen LaBerge
#25. I've always been excited by rotoscoping, the technique used in films like 'Waking Life,' which fuses animation with real-life emotion. It seemed like it was a process ripe for innovation.
Aaron Koblin
#27. If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.
Rene Magritte
#28. It was not possible to hold on to ashes. In my dreams I had always walked out of the past, and it shut behind me, a door I couldn't unlock. Now I intended to do the same in my waking life.
Alice Hoffman
#29. And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives,
Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake,
How if our waking life, like that of sleep,
Be all a dream in that eternal life
To which we wake not till we sleep in death
Pedro Calderon De La Barca
#30. Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.
Cormac McCarthy
#31. What plethora of material goods can possibly atone for a waking life so humanly belittling, if not degrading, as the push-button tasks left to human performers?
Lewis Mumford
#32. And as he reached for William's leg, the way a small child will reach for its mother's, there welled up through a small hole in the bottom of Mercer's soul a relief surpassing any he'd ever known in waking life.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#33. But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.
Margaret Atwood
#34. In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.
Carl Jung
#35. There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.
Sigmund Freud
#36. But that's what dreams are for - to weave reality and fantasy and memory and stitch together something you can't hope for in waking life. To fulfill that little part of you that wants something so bad.
Kelley Armstrong
#37. Our rest is formed by our waking life and our waking life is formed by our sorrows.
Alice Hoffman
#38. One's work usually occupies more than half of one's waking life. Choosing work that does not bring happiness will lead to a life that is mostly disappointing.
Bo Bennett
#39. By understanding the meaning of common dreams, you can identify issues that want your attention in your waking life.
Charles McPhee
#40. Good works begin with praise, worship, and honoring and exalting of God as the temper of one's whole waking life.
J.I. Packer
#41. Memory, which so confounds our waking life with anticipation and regret, may well be our one earthly consolation when time slips out of joint.
Keith Donohue
#42. I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect!
Philip Larkin
#43. Does our reading life balance or subvert our waking life?
Ander Monson
#44. It is good to pay attention to our dreams. For a period of a few weeks, write them down each morning. You don't have to do anything else. Just write them down. They have their own magic and will bleed into your waking life. While
Natalie Goldberg
#45. Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#46. I feel there's a power in theatre, but it's an indirect power. It's like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you can't afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about.
Tony Kushner
#47. The worst type of man behaves as badly in his waking life as some men do in their dreams.
Plato
#48. Something within me is waking from long sleep, and I want to live and move again. Some zest is returning to me, some immense gratefulness for those who love me, some strong wish to love them also. I am full of thanks for life. I have not told myself to be thankful. I am just so.
Alan Paton
#49. Those who have compared our life to a dream were right ... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.
Michel De Montaigne
#50. We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
Annie Dillard
#51. Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.
Meghan O'Rourke
#52. In nature nothing is at standstill, everything pulsates, appears and disappears. Heart, breath, digestion, sleep and waking - birth and death - everything comes and goes in waves. Rhythm, periodicity, harmonious alternation of extremes is the rule. No use rebelling against the very pattern of life.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
#53. How would it feel to live a full life and have no one remember it, to have no one remember the extraordinary things you accomplished, even if it was just waking up every day and finding the courage to get out of bed?
T.J. Klune
#54. People are waking up in their homes - without conferences. They're waking up because life is waking them up, not because of some conference called "Body and Soul."
Rachel Naomi Remen
#55. Do not fear death, fear sleeping without waking up instead.
ABC
#56. The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his own.
Heraclitus
#57. In a life where waking hours are draped in the costume of horrid nightmare, where reality has suddenly become questionable, it's easy to be scared by dreams.
Scott Sigler
#58. Because if I'm going to spend at least seventy-five percent of my waking hours doing something, I want that something to have meaning. I am tired of wasting my time. I am starting to realize that I want my life to matter in every way that it can.
Julie Buxbaum
#59. The hemulen woke up slowly and recognised himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know.
Tove Jansson
#60. In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother's first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air.
Charlotte Mason
#61. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality.
Lev Shestov
#62. There is nothing like waking up at six in the morning and changing a baby's nappy to bring you face to face with life's reality.
Tony Blair
#63. The mystery of life
its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly ... has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why.
Theodore Dreiser
#64. Imagine waking up and finding your first and last view of the world was a shotgun barrel. That'd be a hell of a life.
John Scalzi
#65. Waking up is not a selfish pursuit of happiness, it is a revolutionary stance, from the inside out, for the benefit of all beings in existence.
Noah Levine
#66. If life was a dream, then dying must be the moment when you woke up. It was so simple it must be true. You died, the dream was over, you woke up. That's what people meant when they talked about going to heaven. It was like waking up.
Ian McEwan
#67. Waking up and having a project to work on is one of life's great pleasures.
Kelly Reichardt
#68. The winners in life think constantly in terms of I can, I will, and I am. Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have or would have done, or what they can't do.
Denis Waitley
#69. Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries ... and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#70. Her whole life had been a long and easy dream to lull her helplessly into this waking nightmare.
Stephen King
#71. Waking up in India is like waking up to life itself.
Reymond Page
#72. Waking up is not serious. It is a gentle remembering and an honoring of the present moment as the truth of life.
Leonard Jacobson
#73. As we travel again between life and death,
Waking and dream, blinking, while layers within layers,
None better, none worse, unravel and knit up before us ...
Jay Woodman
#74. She looked like she was waking up in a strange place - only she knew she hadn't gone to sleep yet, and that this was actually life.
David Levithan
#75. The alternatives in my life went through my mind. Unemployed, alone, despairing, watching daytime TV. That couldn't end well.
Or helping people, like genuinely making a difference. Imagine waking up and doing that every day?
Ruth Ahmed
#76. If you have a goal in life that takes a lot of energy, that requires a lot of work, that incurs a great deal of interest and that is a challenge to you, you will always look forward to waking up to see what the new day brings.
Susan Polis Schutz
#77. A good dream was something you clung to until the last moment before waking.
Veronica Rossi
#78. We apologise for interrupting your life but we have an important message from our sponsors the Konichiwa collective software, it's a waking sub routine,
Steve Merrick
#79. Bedeviled, / human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words / that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled / among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
Marie Howe
#80. In every waking moment, it is our next choice that makes us who we are.
Melissa McPhail
#81. There's nothing more uplifting like the joy of waking up every morning knowing your family is safe from the perils of our society".
Abdulazeez Henry Musa
#82. At last awake from life, that insane dream we take for waking now.
Robert Browning
#83. I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.
Edmund White
#84. When we shoot 'Scrubs' I spend every waking hour of my life in an abandoned and haunted hospital. All I can date there are ghosts and they tend to be horrible snugglers.
Zach Braff
#85. All the means we've been given to stay alert we use to ornament our sleep. If instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life more comfortable we'd apply our ingenuity to fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor!
Rene Daumal
#86. Nothing seemed as scary as waking up at 40 and realizing that I had not lived a very courageous life.
Brit Marling
#87. Even if I spend every waking moment attempting to keep my life in balance, I'm going to fuck up. Having
Tyler Oakley
#88. My dreams are crowded with people, as though to compensate for the solitariness of my waking hours.
Anna Lyndsey
#89. If I look at the one thorn that is in my side, of all my life, it is my weight. I fret about it, I'm anxious about it, being an actor on television - it drives me insane. It just seems to be something that plays a central part in waking up in the morning and thinking, 'How am I with myself today?'
Deborah Mailman
#90. I thrive on being on the road, waking up in a different place every day and having my life revolve around music. When you walk out in front of 300,000 people and pull it off, it validates you.
Sheryl Crow
#91. Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#92. As soon as something stops being fun, I think it's time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy. Waking up stressed and miserable is not a good way to live.
Richard Branson
#93. Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.
Mira Lyn Kelly
#94. Nobody knows what either sleep or waking consciousness is, even though these two have long been seen as the two sides of being: part of life's unvarying diurnal rhythm.
Siri Hustvedt
#95. When we dream, we create. All of life is a dream or a series of waking dreams. We dream our surroundings. We dream our friends, our relations. We dream our bodies. We dream our dreams.
Frederick Lenz
#96. I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.
Paul Theroux
#97. Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.
Alice Walker
#98. I love Derrick Brown for the surprise of one word waking up next to another. One moment tender, funny or romantic, the next, visceral, ironic and relevatory-here is the full chaos of life. An amazing talent.
Janet Fitch
#99. Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it.
Sarah Manguso
#100. Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.
Wendell Berry
