Quotes About Illusion

In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.

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.

If an illusion makes a man happy, destroy that illusion! Because happiness must come via the truth!

All is illusion, although as long as there's an illusion that the kids need to be fed, all might as well be reality.

God made the Illusion look Real and the Real an Illusion !

We move from the illusion of certainty, to the certainty of illusion

Everything is a meaningless struggle against nothing and when people say that the world has become a better place that is a false development-optimism. Nothing exists which ever becomes better. Everything stays the same. Somehow, there is nothing. That is so sad. Nothing to come to. Everything is an illusion. A very sweet illusion.

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

Our self illusion is so interwoven with personal memories that when we recall an event, we believe we are retrieving a reliable episode from our history like opening a photograph album and examining a snapshot in time. If we then discover the episode never really happened, then our whole self is called into question. But that's only because we are so committed to the illusion that our self is a reliable story in the first place.

The great human problem of evil stems from the illusion of separateness. Whenever this illusion is overcome, we behave lovingly to one another.

Religious illusion must bow to scientific truth. It is in total error about the nature of the true world. Only science is not an illusion.

Disappointment results from the removal of illusion.

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

How does it feel? I feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes. And you've left your wallet at home. When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.

The trick was looking past the illusion, because the exit was never as far away as it seemed.

Choice is illusion, same as happiness and freedom.

He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

The in­dividual exists only in your imagination. It is just an illusion. When the Atma is one without a sec­ond, when the Atma is everywhere, where is the individual? Only in your imagination. The Atma alone is real. Realize it through meditation.

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

Monopoly power is an illusion in any system in which free competition is allowed.

But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5

I don't work under the illusion that I'm the next whatever. Every time a record comes out, if it gets a good review, I'm like, "Well, one more year, guys. We bought ourselves another year".

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.

I 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.

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

One 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.

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.

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

Thus, the distance between any two galaxies increases in time, creating the illusion of mechanical motion. But in reality, galaxies just sit there, contemplating the spectacle of the universe creating more and more space in between them.

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.

You want to know the biggest illusion about success? That it's like a pinnacle to be climbed, a thing to be possessed, or a static result to be achieved. If you want to succeed, if you want to achieve all your outcomes, you have to think of success as a process, a way of life, a habit of mind, a strategy for life.

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

Control is an illusion.

All 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.

According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize the illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his ego defences and committing metaphorical suicide, that a person can open up to different modes of being and relating and thereby transform himself into a pure essence of humanity. In so doing, he becomes free to recast himself as a much more joyful and productive person, and attains the only species of transcendence and immortality that is open to man.

Illusion I will be, for I've never been a sinner.

That's the rational premise behind my spending hours of billable time adjusting my Facebook preferences. The real reason, of course, for all this stuff, is that it provides a way to blow off work you should be doing, while creating the illusion that you are achieving something.

Action is thought tempered by illusion.

The illusion that you could hold to yourself the things you most want and lose the things you least wanted to keep..ıs the struggle of lıfe.

I have no use whatsoever for projections or forecasts. They create an illusion of apparent precision. The more meticulous they are, the more concerned you should be. We never look at projections, but we care very much about, and look very deeply at, track records. If a company has a lousy track record, but a very bright future, we will miss the opportunity.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.

Illusion is the mantle of the Real

Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.

War." Gorgon spits the word. "That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus and shall always be so.

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.