Aging & Wisdom Quote by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury is pitching charisma as a civic technology: the ability to seed other people’s futures by feeding them images they can’t shake. “Proper dreams” sounds innocent until you hear the quiet discipline in it. He’s not talking about any dream, not the sloppy wish-fulfillment of escapism, but the kind that comes with a moral thermostat - dreams calibrated to make a person bigger than their fear, their boredom, their moment. “Proper” implies craft and curation, the writer’s job of choosing which fantasies deserve daylight.

Then he slips in the real engine: “share the myths.” Myth here isn’t a lie; it’s a template. Bradbury understood that people don’t only learn through arguments, they learn through stories that smuggle values past the brain’s bouncer. Myth is communal software: once you install it in enough minds, it starts generating identity, belonging, and behavior without needing constant enforcement.

The last clause is the provocative one: “they will want to grow up to be like you.” That’s not modest; it’s a frank admission of influence and imitation as the endgame of art. Bradbury is describing mentorship at scale, the way authors, teachers, and culture-makers become surrogate adults in a reader’s life. Context matters: a mid-century American writer watching mass media standardize desire, he’s insisting that imagination isn’t private decoration - it’s leadership. If you offer people myths sturdy enough to live inside, you don’t just entertain them; you recruit them into a version of adulthood.