Quotes About Illusion

If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality.

One problem with people is that as soon as they fill a space it's them you see and not the space. Large, desolate landscapes stop being large, desolate landscapes once they have people in them. They define what the eye sees. And the human eye is almost always directed at other humans. In this way an illusion is created that humans are more important than those things on earth which are not human. It's a sick illusion.

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.

Religion is an illusion and every illusion has the inevitable destiny of a soap bubble!

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.

Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself.

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.

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.

I'd rather go along with this sense of illusion that I'm a neutral beast going along through life doing everything that's preordained.

There is illusion, the way you see things now, thinking that there is a tomorrow, there is a today, there is time and that there is life and death. Those are just appearances

Our society nurtures the illusion that all the rewards go to the people who are perfect. But many of us are finding out that trying to be perfect is costly.

The media create this wonderful illusion-but the amount of airbrushing that goes into those beauty magazines-the hours of hair and makeup! It's impossible to live up to, because it's not real.

Apparently when we enter the Earth existence, the third dimensional reality, we exist with a façade as actors playing various roles. For some it is the adventure of the experience, the journey. For others it is entrapment in an illusion that takes on all the qualities of reality.

I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.

I don't think people would climb mountains or jump off bridges with parachutes or kayak Class V rapids if those things didn't offer the brief and horrible illusion of imminent death. They would just be complicated, time-consuming endeavors that we'd steer well clear of because they got in the way of real life.

I still haven't gotten over this thing of walking down the street and somebody recognizing you because you've been in a movie. There's this illusion that movie stars only exist in the movies. And to see one live is like seeing a leopard let out of the zoo.

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

Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.

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.

He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance.

Religion'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!

Consciousness," according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The "self" was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.

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.

In this world of illusion, where at the end of the examination, we find everything to be of little importance, of little worth, if there is a sign of reality, of something one can depend upon, and in which one can recognize a sign of eternity, it is in the constancy of friendship.

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

Do not waste time trying to overcome your weaknesses and failures. Simply raise your consciousness, transcend and free your thoughts from limitation and illusion, and find within the very center of your being a wholeness and completeness! Cease wallowing in your imperfections and never accept limitations! Aim high, and you will get there. It is only your thoughts that hold you back.

Drop your identification with the illusion of separateness.

A picture story just doesn't run like a film. It doesn't have 24 frames per second. It doesn't deal with this illusion of movement. It's more like if you did an illuminated novel. I think both of those things should be running at full blast, not less of both so it becomes an easier thing. I think it should be twice as dense. That's just what interests me.

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.

And I didn't know I loved her till I'd dreamt of her. I didn't know it was the real thing until an illusion had signalled it.

Don't get caught up on 'I'm brown, black, white, red, blue, whatever.' You gotta ask, what were you called before 1492? All these names we're using now are just an illusion made to keep us fighting each other.

One travels to escape from it all, but that is the great illusion: It cannot be done, since one travels with one's mind.

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

That is what the blueprint for this time is about. We're leaving behind the limitations and the illusion of the struggle. We're moving much more into having a very different experience now on the Earth plane with our sacredness.

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.

There isn't a thought or feeling that doesn't alter or deepen when written. We are a writing animal. That is why all of us feel we have a book inside us. It isn't an illusion. We have got a book inside us.

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

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.

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 curious fascination in this job [U.S. representative] is the illusion that either you are being useful or you could be -- and that's so tempting.

The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

When you want to take over a city, you have to destroy the illusion of safety it provides. You have to hit the large well-protected establishments, find the powerful people who run them and are viewed as invincible, and kill them. You want to destroy the morale first. Once the people's resolve is gone and everyone is scared for their own skin, the city is yours.

People have put a lot of faith in the government's ability to get growth going in China. People have this, what I think, illusion that there are six people in China who really have their hand on every button. And what we're learning is, it's a very big economy and they're not that good at it.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?