Quotes About Illusion

When we make films - even 2D films - you're always trying to create this illusion of 3D, anyway. You're trying to create a believable world with characters walking, in and out of the perspective, to create the illusion that there's a world. The desire and drive to create this illusion of three-dimensional space is something that is true about every kind of film because you want the audience to really be experiencing it, first hand. It's a natural extension of the storytelling and the process of filmmaking.

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion.

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.

That'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.

A shattered illusion is a sorrowful experience; but a life without illusion is a sorrowful life

There's nothing to fear but fear itself. It's an illusion of fear. Fear is an illusion. If you gonna die, you gonna die anyway; it's not something to fear, fear is not gonna help.

The world is not the illusion. It's you who are the illusion.

All 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.

Sexuality, 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.

To me, the art of cinema is the same as the art of painting. The artist takes a 2D medium and gives you the illusion of depth. If you look at any of the great paintings, you have the illusion of depth. Which is part of the art. The same with the great movies.

Posterity has never made the grave's embrace less cruel. It simply assuages our fear of death, because there is no better cure for out inevitable morality then the illusion of a beautiful eternity. But there is one illusion I still hold dear: that is the thought of an enlightened nation. That is the only future I still dream of.

You have the illusion of free will, but, in fact, that illusion comes about because you don't know the future. Because you are a prisoner of the present, forever locked in transition, between the past and the future.

I 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.

Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.

We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

As an actor, the only thing we can do is play the truth at that moment. Because at any point in time if you play the future, or you play that you know something that the audience does not know, it kills the illusion of reality.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.

Also, I had not yet found out about time; I was still under the illusion that I had plenty of time - time for this, time for that, time for everything, time to waste.

Friendship 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.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

There is no more cruel illusion than that war makes a people richer.

I don’t want to hang on and Cry over something so little, Like a springtime illusion that’ll disappear after I wake up

I don't know if this is an illusion but I would love to be able to take my card-throwing skills and be able to puncture a watermelon. Now I know I can take this question and say, "I would want to solve the economic problems in the world" - but I want to stick that card in that watermelon.

Owning things is an obsession in our culture. If we own it, we feel we can control it; and if we control it, we feel it will give us more pleasure. The idea is an illusion.

Reason is the illusion of reality

If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

And if you ever do a survey, you'll find that people prefer illusion to reality, ten to one. Twenty, even.

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.

I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue an accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and I have just been born today.

Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.

Only 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.

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.

Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another. This painting here. I bought it 10 years ago for 60 thousand dollars. I could sell it today for 600. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes, the more desperately they want it.

Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I'm telling you that's a pretty illusion.

Three weeks ago, he’d seen hail fall from the sky, only to be followed minutes later by a spectacular rainbow that seemed to frame the azalea bushes. The colors, so vivid they seemed almost alive, made him think that nature sometimes sends us signs, that it’s important to remember that joy can always follow despair. But a moment later, the rainbow had vanished and the hail returned, and he realized that joy was sometimes only an illusion.

War is being reminded that you are completely at the mercy of death at every moment, without the illusion that you are not. Without the distractions that make life worth living.

Like a lot of writers, I just got sick to death of conventional fiction. I absolutely couldn't stand the illusion of reality and plot. I just couldn't stomach it.

Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was s snare and a delusion... Liberalism and Marxism share a common illusion of the "children of light." Neither understands property as a form of power which can be used in either its individual or its social form as an instrument of particular interest against the general interest.

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

The night is full of mystery. Even when the moon is brightest, secrets hide everywhere. Then the sun rises and its rays cast so many shadows that the day creates more illusion than all the veiled truth of the night.

The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G.K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman's line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a 'twitch upon the thread' draws the fish to land.