"Dreams have as much influence as actions"
About this Quote
Mallarme’s line is a quiet provocation: it refuses the modern hierarchy that treats “real life” as what you do and “mere fantasy” as what you think about. For a Symbolist poet, that hierarchy is the whole problem. “Dreams” aren’t bedtime ephemera here; they’re the inner machinery that scripts desire, fear, ambition, and taste before a person ever makes a move. If actions are the visible tip of a life, dreams are the pressure system below the waterline.
The sentence works because it’s both democratic and destabilizing. It doesn’t claim dreams are nobler than actions, just equally influential. That’s a slippery equivalence, and Mallarme means the slipperiness. Influence is not the same as virtue. Dreams can enlarge the self, but they can also anesthetize it: daydreams of transformation that substitute for transformation, fantasies that excuse cruelty, myths that let institutions dress up power as destiny. By using the neutral “influence,” he forces you to consider how much of history is run on imagined narratives people mistake for inevitability.
Context matters: Mallarme wrote in a late-19th-century France where realism and positivism were swaggering, insisting the world was measurable, reportable, manageable. Symbolism pushed back, arguing that the most consequential truths arrive indirectly, through suggestion, atmosphere, and the half-lit logic of the mind. The line is a manifesto in miniature: if you want to understand what people do, pay attention to what they privately rehearse.
The sentence works because it’s both democratic and destabilizing. It doesn’t claim dreams are nobler than actions, just equally influential. That’s a slippery equivalence, and Mallarme means the slipperiness. Influence is not the same as virtue. Dreams can enlarge the self, but they can also anesthetize it: daydreams of transformation that substitute for transformation, fantasies that excuse cruelty, myths that let institutions dress up power as destiny. By using the neutral “influence,” he forces you to consider how much of history is run on imagined narratives people mistake for inevitability.
Context matters: Mallarme wrote in a late-19th-century France where realism and positivism were swaggering, insisting the world was measurable, reportable, manageable. Symbolism pushed back, arguing that the most consequential truths arrive indirectly, through suggestion, atmosphere, and the half-lit logic of the mind. The line is a manifesto in miniature: if you want to understand what people do, pay attention to what they privately rehearse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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