Famous Quotes About Hope

Gibran wrote in a mystical tradition that treated dreams not as wish-fulfillment but as the soul''s contact with a deeper reality than waking perception can access. The "gate to eternity" suggests dreams are thresholds — not destinations but openings. His writing consistently argued that the invisible world (of spirit, dream, love) is more real than the visible world of commerce and routine.

These opening lines of "Harlem" are among the most famous in 20th-century American poetry. Hughes poses the question that the entire poem then answers with five different images of deferred dreams — raisins, festering sores, rotten meat, sugared crusts — culminating in the explosive possibility: "Or does it explode?" Written in 1951, the poem anticipated the Civil Rights eruptions of the 1960s with remarkable precision. Lorraine Hansberry took A Raisin in the Sun directly from this poem''s central image.

Lewis built his apologetic partly on this observation: if every natural desire has a corresponding satisfaction — hunger has food, loneliness has community — then a desire for which nothing in this world provides full satisfaction is most naturally explained by the existence of another world. He called this longing Sehnsucht, a German word for a deep, bittersweet ache for something beyond reach.

Hughes wrote "Dreams" in 1922 at age 20, during the early surge of the Harlem Renaissance, when Black American artistic life was asserting its legitimacy against a culture that systematically denied it. The broken-winged bird is an image of thwarted vitality — life technically continuing but unable to fulfill its purpose. Hughes spent his career insisting that Black Americans were not only entitled to dream but that those dreams were foundational to American culture itself.

From Achebe's landmark debut novel, this line is a traditional Igbo proverb used to express longing — even a person who cannot walk dreams of movement when beauty appears. Achebe used proverbs extensively throughout the novel to demonstrate the richness of pre-colonial Igbo intellectual culture, countering the Western narrative that Africa lacked civilized tradition.

The novel opens with this cosmogonic line: all of existence began with an affirmation, a consent to being. Lispector's narrator experiences an epiphany while contemplating a cockroach, stripping away all social identity until she reaches raw existence itself. The "yes" that begins everything is both metaphysical origin and ongoing act of will — existence must constantly be re-consented to. The Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz called this her most radical novel.

Roy delivered this as a rallying cry at the World Social Forum after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, insisting that systemic alternatives to capitalism and militarism were not only possible but already gestating. The personification of "another world" as a she who breathes became one of the most quoted lines in the global justice movement. It demonstrates Roy's ability to combine political argument with poetic image.

This line from Roy's novel critiques the half-life of dreams deferred — the desire for safety or approval that leads people to merely exist rather than truly live. It urges full-bodied presence in one's own life rather than a cautious performance of it. Roy herself modeled this philosophy, spending decades between novels as an activist rather than producing comfortable literary output.