Quotes About Illusion

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

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

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

It is my experience that marriage does not make one happier. It destroys the illusion that has been the essence of one's previous existence, that there existed something like a soul-mate. The feeling of not being understood is heightened in marriage by the fact that one's entire life beforehand had the aim of finding a being who would understand one. But isn't it better to exist without such an illusion and look this great lonely truth straight in the eye?

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.

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

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.

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

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.

Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet. It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it means letting go our sane self control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety. But safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the spirit.

That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.

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.

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.

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.

Every perception of color is an illusion, we do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.

I think love is often a bit selfish, even before we had consumerism. That's not new. A consumer society gives you the illusion of having massive amounts of choice and saddles you with the freedom of being able to dabble in that choice. And at the same time, you are left with the tyranny of self-doubt and uncertainty about whether you made the right choice.

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.

Making films is sort of like you're pulling off a magic trick. It's sort of like an illusion. It's not real but you want it to appear real, and all kinds of things go into that, from the clothes you're wearing to the make-up, to the light.

There's this thing, something in the water in America that is so intoxicating as well, that's like your dreams can come true. You can have it all. You can be the master of your destiny. There's this thing it encourages - this illusion of your significance.

I’m glad to be part of the war on sadness. I’m a part time employee of the illusion that keeps people stupid.

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

This craving for health, wealth, long life, and the like - the so - called good - is nothing but an illusion.

Many Sages have said, "Your world is a dream. You're living in an illusion." They're referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality. When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are.

That's the illusion - the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out - and it has affected us in many ways. That's a part of the idea that professing is enough.

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.

The material world may be nothing but illusion.

It's a very important process of self-recognition, self-introspection, by just daily accepting our creation, accepting what is right in front of us, breathing, letting go, and coming into the heart space and knowing that that fear or the struggle is part of the illusion. Just breathe that truth, because as you breathe, it filters through and you'll find that that tightness, that intensity, the fear, the worry, will dissolve. Just allow yourself not to get stuck in that.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

As your relationship with the music gets stronger, so does your motivation for playing it and finding different sounds. If you have the idea that you can find a colour that is better for one composer or another, even if it’s an illusion, this generates enormous pleasure.

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.

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.

All suffering is caused by the illusion of separateness, which generates fear and self-hatred, which eventually causes illness. You are the master of your life. You can do much more than you thought you could, including cure yourself of a "terminal illness".

I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

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

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.

Reason is the illusion of reality

Mindfulness is a quality that's always there. It's an illusion that there's a meditation and post-meditation period, which I always find amusing, because you're either mindful or you're not.

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

The greatest of characters, no doubt, would be he, who, free of all trifling accidental helps, could see objects through one grand immutable medium, always at hand, and proof against illusion and time, reflecting every object in its true shape and colour through all the fluctuation of things.

Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.

The nature of illusion is that, when you see through it, it disappears.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

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

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.

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

When life attains a crisis, man’s focus narrows. […] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion.