Quotes About Illusion

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

In the beginning was belief, foolish belief, and faith, empty faith, and illusion, the terrible illusion. ... We believed in God, had faith in man, and lived with the illusion that in each one of us is a sacred spark from the fire of the shekinah, that each one carried in his eyes and in his soul the sign of God. This was the source—if not the cause—of all our misfortune.

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

The 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.

The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.

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?

Now that you've reached everything, you must slay this illusion without slaying it - without becoming caught up in the illusion of slaying illusions.

I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The illusion could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purpose at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation required the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality

No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.

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.

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.

Allah made the illusion look real and the real an illusion. He concealed the sea and made the foam visible, the wind invisible, and the dust manifest. you see the dust whirling, but how can the dust rise by itself? you see the foam, but not the ocean. invoke Him with deeds, not words; for deeds are real and will save you in the infinite-life.

No one thinks Las Vegas is real; it is illusion, but visitors willingly suspend disbelief and pretend.

Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries.

...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.

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

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.

An illusion which makes me happy is worth a verity which drags me to the ground.

Life balance is a myth. It's an illusion and the very pursuit of it is driving us crazy. For me it's about proportion - it's really a work hard/play hard equation.

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

Confidence is the illusion born of accidental success.

Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.

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

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.

In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.

Although our package of skin and bones looks very convincing, it is a mask, an illusion, disguising our true self, which has no limitations.

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.

The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.

Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.

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.

The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusion about that. Native Americans don't believe they are the Source. They have access to the Source. Endless access. But don't get confused.

Faith is essentially intolerant ... essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also God's cause.

People are distracted by objects of desire, and afterwards repent of the lust they've indulged, because they have indulged with a phantom and are left even farther from Reality than before. Your desire for the illusory is a wing, by means of which a seeker might ascend to Reality. When you have indulged a lust, your wing drops off; you become lame and that fantasy flees. Preserve the wing and don't indulge such lust, so that the wing of desire may bear you to Paradise. People fancy they are enjoying themselves, but they are really tearing out their wings for the sake of an illusion.

the illusion never really dissipates that you can lose twenty pounds in one night by cutting out dinner.

In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion.

There is something truly restorative, finally comforting, in coming to the end of an illusion - a false hope.

Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie. The rude shocks and uncomfortably constraining influences of life disappear among graceful women and poetical men; they are the most deceptive beings in creation; distrust and doubt cannot stand before them; they create what they imagine; if they do not lie to others, they do to their own hearts; for illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness. Beware of grace in woman, and poetry in man -- weapons the more dangerous because the least dreaded!

The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

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

Every once in a while, magicians strike gold. David Regal has created and produced the perfect close-up illusion.

The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.

Synchronize watches at oh six hundred' says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything's happening right on time.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.