But whether it be dream or truth, to do well is what matters. If it be truth, for truth’s sake. If not, then to gain friends for the time when we awaken.

This sentiment is associated with Calderón’s philosophical drama about illusion and reality, commonly linked to his play *La vida es sueño* (*Life Is a Dream*). The line is typically attributed to the play’s moral center: even if human experience proves as unstable as a dream, ethical action remains imperative. In the drama, questions of fate, free will, and the reliability of perception are dramatized through a prince who cannot trust whether his brief taste of power was real or imagined. The quote functions as a practical rule for conduct amid uncertainty—an answer to the play’s central anxiety about how to live when one cannot be sure what is “true.”

The speaker argues that ethical action should not depend on certainty about reality’s status. Whether life proves to be “dream” (illusion, transience, or deception) or “truth” (stable reality), the practical imperative remains: act well. If reality is true, goodness honors truth itself; if it is dreamlike, goodness still has value because it builds human bonds—“friends”—that will matter when the illusion ends and one “awakens.” The line thus links Calderón’s baroque preoccupation with appearance versus reality to a moral conclusion: virtue is justified both metaphysically (for truth’s sake) and socially (for solidarity amid uncertainty).