Thoreau's castles

 

You said:

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau

 

In reality most of them are best left up there.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a rather dryly practical take — and I can see the wisdom in it. Some castles in the air are dreams that are worth grounding in reality, but others may be better kept as pure imagination, like little private landscapes of possibility.

The line you quoted is from Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was often urging people to turn idealism into lived experiment, but even he spent a good deal of time walking around his own “castle” rather than finishing a conventional one.

I suspect many people need both: a few dreams that are deliberately built upon, and a few that are left floating because their value lies in what they symbolize rather than what they become. Sometimes touching a dream too firmly makes it ordinary — or disappointingly smaller than it was when it was still in the air.