Popular quotes about Illusion! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
Jean CocteauIf an illusion makes a man happy, destroy that illusion! Because happiness must come via the truth!
Mehmet Murat IldanWhere the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.
Clement GreenbergWherever desire exists ego exists, and wherever ego exists illusion exists because ego is the greatest illusion there is. Even in a beggar who has nothing else you will find the same ego as you will find in Alexander the Great, because desiring is the same. Alexander the Great may have much money and much power, that does not matter; he is still desiring. The beggar may not have anything, but he is also desiring.
RajneeshThe camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.
Thomas MertonThat's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.
Truman CapoteLate at night, when everyone is quiet, sit alone and gaze into the mind; then you notice illusion ending and reality appearing. You gain a great sense of potential in this every time. Once you have noticed reality appearing yet find that illusion is hard to escape, you also find yourself greatly humbled.
Zicheng HongAll is illusion, although as long as there's an illusion that the kids need to be fed, all might as well be reality.
Robert BreaultIt is my experience that marriage does not make one happier. It destroys the illusion that has been the essence of one's previous existence, that there existed something like a soul-mate. The feeling of not being understood is heightened in marriage by the fact that one's entire life beforehand had the aim of finding a being who would understand one. But isn't it better to exist without such an illusion and look this great lonely truth straight in the eye?
Paula Modersohn-BeckerNo, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
Sigmund FreudAll writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.
John Kenneth GalbraithSexuality, for the person who practices tantra, is a marvelous way to experience illusion. Illusion is just another way of seeing things. There are no illusions because there is no self.
Frederick LenzMake peace with guilt. Guilt is a poisonous illusion. Many languages don't even have a word for guilt.
Kris CarrI never felt big enough playing Thor. And then people talk about you like you're 9-foot tall and 800 pounds. I'm well aware of the illusion. There's not a second where I go: Yeah, I'm a god.
Chris HemsworthI think love is often a bit selfish, even before we had consumerism. That's not new. A consumer society gives you the illusion of having massive amounts of choice and saddles you with the freedom of being able to dabble in that choice. And at the same time, you are left with the tyranny of self-doubt and uncertainty about whether you made the right choice.
Esther PerelThe reason the factions were evil is because there was no way out of them. They gave us the illusion of choice without actually giving us a choice.
Veronica RothWe have all learned everything we know physicallyโfrom walking to running a marathonโby trial and error, so there's no reason to become our own worst enemies when we suffer a setback. From time to time everyone falls short of their goals. It's an illusion to believe that champions succeed because they do everything perfectly. You can be certain that every archer who hits the bull's-eye has also missed the bull's-eye a thousand times while learning the skill.
Amby BurfootFor a found-footage-style movie, there's a definite advantage in using unknowns, because it helps sell the illusion that it's real. A known actor would get in the way of the suspension of disbelief.
Oren PeliThe illusion of magic is an idealistic fantasy; it exists only in the imagination of the spectator.
Paul LePaulThe distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert EinsteinEither the material order is the whole of being, wherein all transcendence is an illusion, or it is the phenomenal surface - mysterious, beautiful, terrible, harsh, and haunting - of a world of living spirits.... One should... be able to recognize that it is only the latter view that has ever had the power - over centuries and in every realm of human accomplishment - to summon desire beyond the boring limits marked by mortality, to endow the will with constancy and purpose, and to shape imagination towards ends that should not be possible within the narrow economies of the flesh.
David Bentley HartI am here to tell you there's nothing in people knowing you. There's actually a loss in that! Really, the reward in life is genuinely the day of work you have. It's not the name you're making for yourself or the clicks and likes - it's such an illusion.
Lauren GrahamThe saddest illusion of the revolutionary is that revolution itself will transform the nature of human beings.
Shirley WilliamsIt's a very important process of self-recognition, self-introspection, by just daily accepting our creation, accepting what is right in front of us, breathing, letting go, and coming into the heart space and knowing that that fear or the struggle is part of the illusion. Just breathe that truth, because as you breathe, it filters through and you'll find that that tightness, that intensity, the fear, the worry, will dissolve. Just allow yourself not to get stuck in that.
Christine McCormick DayFriendship was another illusion like love, though it did not reach the same mad heights. People pretended that they were friends, when the fact was they were brought together by force of circumstances.
R.K. Narayanfree time is an illusion. It's what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight.
Tamora PierceReligion's biggest crime is to slow down the Human's Intellectual Evolution! It creates an illusion as if there is a safe port somewhere. The truth is that there is no safe port; man is in emptiness! Intellectual Evolution is our only chance to build a safe port by ourselves!
Mehmet Murat IldanThe War Party has two wings: the Democrats and the Republicans. All others are outsiders, whose ability to storm the gates is 'legally' restricted by a nearly impassable series of bureaucratic obstacles designed to keep them out while still maintaining the 'democratic' illusion, i.e. the phony two-party system, which is in reality a single entity.
Justin RaimondoThe key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.
Thomas MooreThe illusion that consumption - and its correlative, income - is desirable probably stems from too great preoccupation with what Knight calls "one-use goods," such as food and fuel, where the utilization and consumption of the good are tightly bound together in a single act or event. ... any economy in the consumption of fuel that enables us to maintain warmth or to generate power with lessened consumption again leaves us better off. ... there is no great value in consumption itself.
Kenneth E. BouldingOne of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.
Gary GiddinsDespite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan SontagThis world is all a fleeting show, For man's illusion given The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow, Theres nothing true but Heaven.
Charles LambHuman life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.
Blaise PascalThe self is fundamentally an illusion arising as a reflection of the soul in matter, much as a clear lake at midnight reflects the moon.
Fred Alan WolfThe highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheLove easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.
Tom RobbinsAh, love. Thatโs what the world has lost. Thereโs no more love, only the illusion of it.
Lauren DeStefanoAll things look good from far away and it is man's eternally persistent childlike faith in the reality of that illusion that has made him the triumphant restless being he is.
Rockwell KentA tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.
Kobo AbeOne of the interesting things about Los Angeles is that it's still supplying the whole of the world with its dreams through movies and songs and TV - often of an all-American family at the same time as the real Los Angeles is peopled by souls from Vietnam, Guatemala, and Korea who look nothing like the images being beamed out. I think all that is going to have to change and illusion is going to have to catch up with reality in that regard.
Pico IyerShe passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and it accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.
Khaled HosseiniOnly later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.
Nicole Krauss