Success Quote by James Thomson

Life, for Thomson, isn’t a march of solid facts so much as a looping gallery of impressions. The line turns existence into a “dream” not to flatter it with romance, but to demote it: what feels permanent is really recurring imagery, half-chosen and half-imposed. “Shapes return” is the key phrase. He doesn’t say memories return, or events repeat, but shapes - vague forms, motifs, emotional silhouettes. That vagueness is the point: our inner life edits reality into patterns we can carry, and then replays them when it wants.

The rhythm of the sentence performs its argument. The phrase “some frequently, some seldom” works like a musical variation, a little riff of recurrence and delay. It suggests that identity is built less from singular revelations than from the repeated visitation of certain moods: longing, dread, desire, regret. Then Thomson slides from frequency to timing - “by night and some by day” - collapsing the boundary between unconscious and conscious life. Dreams aren’t quarantined to sleep; they leak into daylight as habits of thought, familiar anxieties, sudden sweetness.

Context matters: Thomson writes in an 18th-century world where reason is ascendant, yet sentiment and introspection are becoming marketable, even fashionable. This line quietly resists the era’s confidence in rational control. It’s less philosophy than psychological realism avant la lettre: you don’t command your “shapes”; you host them, again and again, until they start to look like fate.