# The most famous lines from Life Is a Dream

Segismundo locked in his tower, the 'and dreams are only dreams' soliloquy and other lines by Calderón de la Barca still quoted almost four centuries later, with their act.

- 7 votes · 11 items
- Feb 4, 2020 · fotograma_del_sur
- https://even.best/en/l/4554/the-most-famous-lines-from-life-is-a-dream

## Top 11

1. **What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction… for all of life is a dream, and dreams are only dreams.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Segismundo, Act Two, scene XIX.
2. **For man's greatest crime is to have been born.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Segismundo, Act One (the tower soliloquy).
3. **The king dreams he is king, and lives deceived, ruling.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Segismundo, Act Two, scene XIX.
4. **Oh, wretched me! Oh, unhappy me! Heavens, I seek to know, since you treat me so, what crime I committed against you by being born.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Segismundo, Act One.
5. **But whether it be truth or dream, doing good is what matters.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Segismundo, Act Three.
6. **Violent hippogriff that raced the wind…** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Rosaura, Act One, scene I: the play's opening lines.
7. **I dream that I am here, laden with these chains, and I dreamed I once saw myself in a happier state.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Segismundo, Act Two, scene XIX.
8. **They say a wise man was once so poor and wretched that he lived only on the herbs he gathered.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — Rosaura, Act One; the stanza ends with another wise man picking up the leaves he threw away.
9. **He whom knowledge harms is his own murderer.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — King Basilio, Act One, scene VI.
10. **For in such battles the victors are the loyal ones, the vanquished the traitors.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — King Basilio, Act Three.
11. **He speaks best, my lord, who best keeps silent.** (-1 · ▲0 ▼1) — Rosaura to Segismundo, Act Three, scene VIII.

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