Quotes About Illusion

Banks and churches and courtrooms all depend on the appurtenances of theatre. On illusion. Banks, the illusion of stability and honourable dealings to the rot and corruption of capitalist exploitation. Churches the illusion of sacred sanctuary of purposes of pacifying social discontent. Courtrooms of course designed to promote the illusion of solemn justice. If there was true justice why would such trappings be necessary? Wouldn't a table and chairs and an ordinary room serve just as well?

Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a naive species. It is an illusion that has cost us much, ensnared us in our own designs, given us a few boasts to make about our courage and genius, but all the same it is an illusion.

Many of us rely on our own illusion of control. But when God makes it known to you that you're not the one steering the ship, be thankful. He has removed the illusion, and forced you to rely only on Him.

I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice... The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.

So now that the illusion of infinite growth is being exposed, the corresponding ballooning entitlements that enticed the larger public to become complicit in the illusion are becoming unglued.

Debts grow and grow. And the more they grow, the more they shrink the economy. When you shrink the economy, you shrink the ability to pay the debts, so it's all an illusion that the system can be saved. The question is, how long are people going to be willing to live in this illusion?

Everything goes through the cycle of birth, growth, maturation, decay and death. But all of this is an illusion. Everything we see is an illusion.

The role of television is the illusion of company, noise. I call it the fifth wall and the second window: the window of illusion.

Truth is only an illusion we have forgotten is an illusion.

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

Realize all this as illusion, realize that within the illusion is the Real.

If you see the illusion you are enlightened, but if you think that you are enlightened you are in the illusion!

You convinced yourselves we're just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser's way out. Your way.

Now suppose that the clue experiences that can correct the illusion become for some reason increasingly scarce – perhaps because the dominant story itself brings about their elimination! Then the illusion might go on for a very long time, might have to result in real catastrophe, before anyone realizes anything is wrong.

When you finally realize that peace is your natural state of being then you will know that any form of non-peace is a belief in illusion. Illusion that anything should be something other than what it is which can never be so. What if instead of waiting for what isn't to become your version of what is, why don't you be peaceful right now while you alter what isn't for you if you so choose? Is it ever worth it to wear a cloak of non-peacefulness over God Brilliance?

Luck is merely an illusion, trusted by the ignorant and chased by the foolish.

...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

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.

If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.

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.

Choice is illusion, same as happiness and freedom.

We are apt to think we know what time is because we can measure it, but no sooner do we reflect upon it than that illusion goes. So it appears that the range of the measureable is not the range of the knowable. There are things we can measure, like time, but yet our minds do not grasp their meaning. There are things we cannot measure, like happiness or pain, and yet their meaning is perfectly clear to us.

It is an illusion to suppose that a Dictator makes himself; at most he seizes an opportunity made for him by passive, stupid, incompetent, and above all, unsatisfied and fearful men.

We enjoy this illusion of continuity and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life, but the end of memories

All these people that I used to know, they're an illusion to me now. Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters' wives.

Usually, about two years of work go into each illusion, whether it's big or small. Two years of work on each five-minute piece.

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.

Either 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.

We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day.

A European currency will lead to member-nations transferring their sovereignty over financial and wage policies as well as in monetary affairs... It is an illusion to think that States can hold on to their autonomy over taxation policies.

The material world may be nothing but illusion.

Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.

The 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.

I would warn against too much of a radical devotion to rationality. Rationality is an illusion, an invented concept, a construct from the mind of man. It is not a property of the universe. Rationality may be a useful tool when it suits our purposes, however, it is merely a measuring stick, calibrated against what we know of the nature of the universe - all of which may or may not be completely inaccurate.

It is only an illusion that time is running out. This is where the problem of fear arises. We become anxious that "I don't have enough time and I have to do everything quickly." We need to turn our attention away from results, achievements and outcomes.

This 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.

Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.

...Every single one of us goes through life depending on and bound by our individual knowledge and awareness. And we call it reality. However, both knowledge and awareness are equivocal. One's reality might be another's illusion. We all live inside our own fantasies, don't you think?

There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion.

What a costume designer does is a cross between magic and camouflage. We create the illusion of changing the actors into what they are not. We ask the public to believe that every time they see a performer on the screen he's become a different person.

We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.

The superior thing ... was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual.

Ugliness is an illusion, gentlemen. Like beauty. Like color. All depends on the light. The only reality is action.

The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.

Action is thought tempered by illusion.