116 Visionary Quotes

Are you in search of inspiration to spark your imagination and propel your visions to new heights? Look no further! We've meticulously curated a collection of the top 116 visionary quotes that capture the essence of dreaming big, thinking forward, and embracing innovation. These timeless words of wisdom from some of the world's greatest thinkers, leaders, and creators will not only motivate you but also remind you of the limitless potential within. Whether you need a boost of creativity, a nudge to pursue your passions, or just a bit of encouragement to keep pushing toward your goals, this collection is your perfect starting point. Dive in and let these visionary quotes illuminate your path to greatness.

1. “It’s a secondhand world we’re born into. What is novel to us is only so because we’re newborn, and what we cannot see, that has come before- what our parents have seen and been and done- are the hand-me-downs we begin to wear as swaddling clothes, even as we ourselves are naked. The flaw runs through us, implicating us in its imperfection even as it separates us, delivers us onto opposite sides of a chasm. It is both terribly beautiful and terribly sad, but it is, finally, the fault in the universe that gives birth to us all.” - Katherine Min

2. “The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.” - Allan Bloom

3. “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.” - Dorothea Lange

4. “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” - Meister Eckhart

5. “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” - Audre Lorde

6. “The most pathetic person in the world is some one who has sight but no vision.” - Helen Keller

7. “If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!” - Pablo Picasso

8. “Every child needs a champion.” - Hillary Rodham Clinton

9. “To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.” - Lawrence Clark Powell

10. “The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

11. “The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.” - Leonora Carrington (Down Below)

12. “Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.” - Isaac Bashevis Singer

13. “The first step toward creating an improved future is developing the ability to envision it. VISION will ignite the fire of passion that fuels our commitment to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to achieve excellence. Only VISION allows us to transform dreams of greatness into the reality of achievement through human action. VISION has no boundaries and knows no limits. Our VISION is what we become in life. ” - Tony Dungy

14. “There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.” - August Strindberg

15. “The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.” - Francis Bacon

16. “The core of any family is what is changeless, what is going to be there──shared vision and values.” - Stephen R. Covey

17. “A country without vision runs to every direction.” - Toba Beta

18. “He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.” - Charles Baudelaire

19. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.” - David Langford

20. “A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.” - Bruce Lee

21. “Never look directly at the sun. Instead, look at the sunflower.” - Vera Nazarian

22. “Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.” - Edward Hopper

23. “Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.” - Victor Hugo

24. “It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.” - Loren Eiseley

25. “Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.” - Mary Gaitskill

26. “If you see the world and yourself through a lens smudged by negativity then you’ll find much misery. If you look outwards and inwards through lens brightened by positivity you’ll find much to be happy and appreciative about.” - Henrik Edberg

27. “The person who sees the difficulties so clearly that he does not discern the possibilities cannot inspire a vision in others.” - J. Oswald Sanders

28. “Live your vision and demand your success.” - Steve Maraboli

29. “The more boundless your vision, the more real you are.” - Deepak Chopra

30. “I pray for you, that all your misgivings will be melted to thanksgivings. Remember that the shadow a thing casts often far exceeds the size of the thing itself (especially if the light be low on the horizon) and though some future fear may strut brave darkness as you approach, the thing itself will be but a speck when seen from beyond. Oh that He would restore us often with that 'aspect from beyond,' to see a thing as He sees it, to remember that He dealeth with us as with sons.” - Jim Elliot

31. “Those who look behind will never see beyond.” - Sherry K. White

32. “A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.” - Jack Kerouac

33. “We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed.” - Alexander McCall Smith

34. “On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage - the first I had ever seen - in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.” - H.P. Lovecraft

35. “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” - Alan Turing

36. “People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?"[Interview in The Independent, 15 October 2005]” - Lemmy Kilmister

37. “A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown.” - Dennis Waitley

38. “Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son. The cross was the proof of His love – that He gave that Son, that He let Him go to Calvary’s cross, though “legions of angels” might have rescued Him. He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.” - Elisabeth Elliot

39. “The best way to succeed is to have a specific Intent, a clear Vision, a plan of Action, and the ability to maintain Clarity. Those are the Four Pillars of Success. It never fails!” - Steve Maraboli

40. “The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.” - Haruki Murakami

41. “I'm going to be a great leader of this generation.The stars in the space up there are my witnesses.” - Toba Beta

42. “I have had my vision.” - Virginia Woolf

43. “A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.” - George Eliot

44. “Not all dreamers are winners, but all winners are dreamers. Your dream is the key to your future. The Bible says that, "without a vision (dream), a people perish." You need a dream, if you're going to succeed in anything you do.” - Mark Gorman

45. “I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

46. “Just give me a thousand words and you may make your own pictures.” - Erica Goros

47. “Fully inhale your dream and completely exhale manifestation of it.” - T.F. Hodge

48. “Though the body is itsgenesis, a poem is the vision of a processOut of ceaseless motion in edgeless spaceCarved in space, vision your poor eye's singlearmor against winter spring summer fall” - Frank Bidart

49. “There's no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that's that.” - John Burnham Schwartz

50. “Mirrors are perpetually deceitful. They lie and steal your true self. They reveal only what your mind believes it sees” - Dee Remy

51. “It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china, the dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become. ("The Destructors")” - Graham Greene

52. “When you see people only as personalities, rather than souls with life missions to fulfill, you forever limit the growth and possibilities of what God has in store for another person.” - Shannon Alder

53. “Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” - Criss Jami

54. “There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper...” - Criss Jami

55. “A lesson in bringing about true changes of mind and heart comes from a Japanese functionary. By day, he crunched numbers that showed his country was approaching imminent energy crisis and helped to craft policy. By night, he weaved a novel in which a bureaucrat-hero helps see the country through to new energy sources. When the crisis came faster than he expected, he actually put the novel away because he did not want to make the burden of his countrymen worse. When the short-term crisis passed, he published his novel. It's phenomenal and well-timed success fueled the vision that inspired difficult change and maintained a sense of urgency.” - Daniel Yergin

56. “Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.” - Henry Adams

57. “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” - Jack Welch

58. “Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn't get to have.” - Ann Brashares

59. “If you need a reason to get involved in world politics, all you need to do is watch a playground of children for awhile. Imagine a world that happy and free all the time, that vision is the future worth fighting for.” - Laurance Kitts

60. “I firmly believe that we are all given signs and dreams and put in situations that define who we were and who we are to become. All of it points towards our destiny. All we need to do is listen carefully to the messages and follow our dreams. It is in our dreams that we find our true identities and where our destiny awaits.” - Isaiah Washington

61. “Vision without guts is fantasy.Visi tanpa nyali adalah fantasi.” - Toba Beta

62. “Sympathy is the child of imagination” - Clarence Darrow

63. “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision.” - Helen Keller

64. “How can you fall in love at first sight when you can't even see?” - Melinda Cross

65. “The author refers to a player's affected nonchalance and comments he is, "too young to realize you are what you pretend to be.” - Michael Lewis

66. “CHAPTER VIConcerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired By One's Own Arms And AbilityLET no one be surprised if, in speaking of entirely new principalities as I shall do, I adduce the highest examples both of prince and of state; because men, walking almost always in paths beaten by others, and following by imitation their deeds, are yet unable to keep entirely to the ways of others or attain to the power of those they imitate. A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.” - Nicolo Machiavelli

67. “You're a Dark One," said Anton. "All you see in everything is evil, treachery, trickery.""All I do is not close my eyes to them," Edgar retorted. "And that's why I don't trust Zabulon. I distrust him almost as much as I do Gesar. I can even trust you more—you're just another unfortunate chess piece who happens by chance to be painted a different color from me. Does a white pawn hate a black one? No. Especially if the two pawns have their heads down together over a quiet beer or two.""You know," Anton said in a slightly surprised voice, "I just don't understand how you can carry on living if you see the world like that. I'd just go and hang myself.""So you don't have any counterarguments to offer?"Anton took a gulp of beer too. The wonderful thing about this natural Czech beer was that even if you drank lots of it, it still didn't make your head or your body feel heavy... Or was that an illusion?"Not a single one," Anton admitted. "Right now, this very moment, not a single one. But I'm sure you're wrong. It's just difficult to argue about the colors of the rainbow with a blind man. There's something missing in you... I don't know what exactly. But it's something very important, and without it you're more helpless than a blind man.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

68. “In this day and age, there is a special mandate for every one of us to be in-charge of our lives by sitting at the driver's seat of our lives. Rule your world!” - Ifeanyi C.O. Obiakor

69. “I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.” - Helen Keller

70. “When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you home with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places. Our neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague...'My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he left my mind resting on the word Prague with a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were summer sunshine of a long-past century arrested in its course-unrefreshed for ages by dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the new birth of morning. A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons had fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart was palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me; I would take it presently. ("The Lifted Veil")” - Mary Ann Evans

71. “A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness. In fact, he creates new appearances of things.” - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

72. “We are often taught to look for the beauty in all things, so in finding it, the layman asks the philosopher while the philosopher asks the photographer.” - Criss Jami

73. “Without action, a vision is just a piece of paper. In education, we have lots of paper.” - William Sterrett

74. “The one who cannot see your vision will be blinded by your mission.” - Habeeb Akande

75. “Vision is tomorrow's reality expressed as an idea today.” - Orrin Woodward

76. “As Christians, we are not to beg for signs and wonders but, to command them all the time and not some of the time.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

77. “The camera has always been a guide, and it's allowed me to see things and focus on things that maybe an average person wouldn't even notice.” - Don Chadwick

78. “If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.” - Simon Sinek

79. “Right now fear, doubt, anxiety, tension and disharmony are reigning supreme.But there shall come a time when this world of ours will be flooded with peace.Who is going to bring about this radical change?It will be you: you and your sisters and brothers.You and your oneness-heart will spread peace throughout the length and breadth of the world.” - Sri Chinmoy

80. “He asked, looking at her dark-rimmed eyes, "You do not sleep?"She shivered. "No. I do not want to sleep any more. I sleep too much already. It is so cold, where Quincy sends me in my sleep. Deep into the house, farther in, not into the house we see. It is as if that house were a face, and when you see a face you can't see the brain or the thoughts of the person behind it. And it is so strange - the house inside the house."********"How is it strange - this that you call the house inside the house?"She said vaguely, her eyes growing glassy, "Strange. Shapes change, and sizes. The rooms are different: bigger and blacker and longer and the shadows are full of things. Creatures - or sometimes the rooms get smaller, fewer, and the furnishings change and change, like the scenes in a kaleidoscope, and I see the people in the portraits walking about in them.” - Evangeline Walton

81. “What a strange thing it is to wake up to a milk-white overcast June morning! The sun is hidden by a thick cotton blanket of clouds, and the air is vapor-filled and hazy with a concentration of blooming scent.The world is somnolent and cool, in a temporary reprieve from the normal heat and radiance.But the sensation of illusion is strong. Because the sun can break through the clouds at any moment . . .What a soft thoughtful time.In this illusory gloom, like a night-blooming flower, let your imagination bloom in a riot of color.” - Vera Nazarian

82. “Author points out in Woodrow Wilson the flipside of the positive we might call big picture vision. He observes that as college president Wilson resorted to the language of a national crusade when he met resistance in a local, academic issue.” - David Pietrusza

83. “Most of the church landscape in my lifetime has been heavily invested in trying to do something for Jerry or Sherri or some other icon of unchurchness. The problem is that they have been only about themselves from the moment they could wail for their mothers, and the decision to give them at church what they can find in any self-help book appears now as a choice to abandon the One in whose honor the church gathers. What they need is to be set free from themselves with finality and to be lost in the awesome wonder of the manifest presence of God. It was never God’s desire that He would sit on the sideline and watch us frantically devise impressive ways to reach people or simply hold the line on orthodoxy as though faithfulness can exist in a vacuum apart from fruitfulness. God is the Matter of first importance! Can you say that about your current weekly encounter with church?” - James MacDonald

84. “Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.” - James Robertson

85. “We can never be entirely original, as artists or as people. The genius and vision of those who came before us is too great for us to digress from entirely. Though, as creatures that are compelled to test and surpass our own creative abilities, we must always strive for that originality in everything we do in order to move the world forward.” - Jessica Lave

86. “At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.” - William Golding

87. “Many of the most powerful things in life are not tangible. All it takes is for you to close your eyes to see.” - Shannon L. Alder

88. “Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.” - Allen Ginsberg

89. “To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.” - Dejan Stojanovic

90. “To fulfill your vision, you must have hindsight, insight and foresight.” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

91. “How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

92. “Pains are not to be relievedSorrows are not to fade awaya slight change in the visionmay bring a new experience” - Rixa White

93. “I had no choice but to accept these voices and images as my gift. My ability. Their energy engrossed my music. I played passionately for them. To set them free. They were part of my life now. I didn't chose them, they chose me."...Elizabeth (DESCENDANT– chapter 2)” - L.J. Amodeo

94. “Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.” - Richard Holmes

95. “Leaders must see the dream in their mind before they will accomplish the dream with their team.” - Orrin Woodward

96. “One of the best gifts you can give to someone, is a wider perspective. It's also one of the best gifts you can receive. So if you have given someone a wider perspective, don't feel bad about it (about taking their blindfolds off and having to watch them cringe in the newfound sunlight); I know it's hard, but you're doing them a lasting favor. And a wider perspective can be difficult for you yourself to accept, in the beginning (during the time that you squint while the sunlight stings your own eyes), but later you'll find yourself coming back to it, even if you abandoned it as something worthless; you'll look for it, one day. Or it will grow on you. Perspective.” - C. JoyBell C.

97. “Give form to your vision. Disregard the fact that it appears to entail efforts. Express what you have inside and communicate it everywhere.” - Franco Santoro

98. “Sight is seeing with the eyes; vision is seeing with the mind.” - Orrin Woodward

99. “Love is blind but boundless in vision.” - Emmanuel Aghado

100. “And that date, too, is far off?''Far off; when it comes, think your end in this world is at hand!''How and what is the end? Look east, west, south and north.' 'In the north, where you never yet trod, towards the point whence your instincts have warned you, there a spectre will seize you. 'Tis Death! I see a ship - it is haunted - 'tis chased - it sails on. Baffled navies sail after that ship. It enters the regions of ice. It passes a sky red with meteors. Two moons stand on high, over ice-reefs. I see the ship locked between white defiles - they are ice-rocks. I see the dead strew the decks - stark and livid, green mold on their limbs. All are dead, but one man - it is you! But years, though so slowly they come, have then scathed you. There is the coming of age on your brow, and the will is relaxed in the cells of the brain. Still that will, though enfeebled, exceeds all that man knew before you, through the will you live on, gnawed with famine; and nature no longer obeys you in that death-spreading region; the sky is a sky of iron, and the air has iron clamps, and the ice-rocks wedge in the ship. Hark how it cracks and groans. Ice will imbed it as amber imbeds a straw. And a man has gone forth, living yet, from the ship and its dead; and he has clambered up the spikes of an iceberg, and the two moons gaze down on his form. That man is yourself; and terror is on you - terror; and terror has swallowed your will. And I see swarming up the steep ice-rock, grey grisly things. The bears of the north have scented their quarry - they come near you and nearer, shambling and rolling their bulk, and in that day every moment shall seem to you longer than the centuries through which you have passed. And heed this - after life, moments continued make the bliss or the hell of eternity.' 'Hush,' said the whisper; 'but the day, you assure me, is far off - very far! I go back to the almond and rose of Damascus! - sleep!' ("The House And The Brain” - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

101. “In order to succeed we need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders to whom are granted great visions, who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true; who can kindle the people with the fire from their own burning souls. The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument, to be used until broken and then to be cast aside; and if he is worth his salt he will care no more when he is broken than a soldier cares when he is sent where his life is forfeit in order that the victory may be won.” - Theodore Roosevelt

102. “Wise leaders understand that the single greatest determinant of whether followers will ever own a vision deeply is the extent to which whose followers believe the leader will own it.” - Bill Hybels

103. “There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth.” - Mark Kurlansky

104. “How you look it is pretty much how you'll see it” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

105. “Armed neutrality makes it much easier to detect hypocrisy.” - Criss Jami

106. “You may not like what I see but I don't like what you do.” - Donna Lynn Hope

107. “It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.” - Helen Bevington

108. “You may pray to God to remove the hills on your way and fill every pothole on your path; but don’t be surprised if God gives you a shovel to do so!” - Israelmore Ayivor

109. “Those who see the world through the lens of love are the true visionaries.” - Bryant McGill

110. “Everything great that has ever happened to humanity has begun as a single thought in someone's mind, and if anyone of us is capable of such a thought, then all of us has the same capacity, capability, because we're all the same.” - Yanni

111. “If you can see everything in all directions, there is no such thing as up or down, left or right.” - Amjad Khan

112. “It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macrosopically.” - Marilyn Frye

113. “Too often our visions of the futureare dull and impotentlike a hammer beating the water.” - Harley King

114. “He hoped and feared,' continued Solon, in a low. mournful voice; 'but at times he was very miserable, because he did not think it possible that so much happiness was reserved for him as the love of this beautiful, innocent girl. At night, when he was in bed, and all the world was dreaming, he lay awake looking up at the old books against the walls, thinking how he could bring about the charming of her heart. One night, when he was thinking of this, he suddenly found himself in a beautiful country, where the light did not come from sun or moon or stars, but floated round and over and in everything like the atmosphere. On all sides he heard mysterious melodies sung by strangely musical voices. None of the features of the landscape was definite; yet when he looked on the vague harmonies of colour that melted one into another before his sight he was filled with a sense of inexplicable beauty. On every side of him fluttered radiant bodies, which darted to and fro through the illuminated space. They were not birds, yet they flew like birds; and as each one crossed the path of his vision he felt a strange delight flash through his brain, and straightaway an interior voice seemed to sing beneath the vaulted dome of his temples a verse containing some beautiful thought. Little fairies were all this time dancing and fluttering around him, perching on his head, on his shoulders, or balancing themselves on his fingertips. 'Where am I?' he asked. 'Ah, Solon?' he heard them whisper, in tones that sounded like the distant tinkling of silver bells, "this land is nameless; but those who tread its soil, and breathe its air, and gaze on its floating sparks of light, are poets forevermore.' Having said this, they vanished, and with them the beautiful indefinite land, and the flashing lights, and the illumined air; and the hunchback found himself again in bed, with the moonlight quivering on the floor, and the dusty books on their shelves, grim and mouldy as ever.'("The Wondersmith")” - Fitz-James O'Brien

115. “A vision without a task is but a dream. A task without a vision is drudgery. A vision and a task are the hope of the world.” - Inscription on a church wall in Sussex England c. 1730

116. “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details….” - Jeff Bezos