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?

Nirvana is a word that means enlightenment, being beyond the illusion of birth and death, the illusion of pain, the illusion of love, the illusion of time and life.

I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.

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.

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

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

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled in them, and each time they come into contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.

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

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

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

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

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.

I never felt big enough playing Thor. And then people talk about you like you're 9-foot tall and 800 pounds. I'm well aware of the illusion. There's not a second where I go: Yeah, I'm a god.

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.

When we cultivate mystical awareness or transcendent identity--which is a natural outgrowth of meditation and other practices--what happens is that we begin to take a witness position on our own lives, and that includes our minds. We break the illusion that we think our own thoughts, which is not always the case. Some ideas just arrive in our heads.

I'm in show business. I believe in illusion and delusions and in holding aloft the bubble of a dream of some sort because, really, there are lots of reasons to look at the chasm. But art and music, these ineffables, they're just - they're the consolations of what human beings can create and make, and delight is accessible, you know, should you care to find it.

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

There are limits to how much sound a cello can make. That's part of the framing of acoustical instruments. Finding what those limits might be, and then trying to suggest perhaps even the illusion of going beyond is part of that kind of effort.

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.

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.

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

The material world may be nothing but illusion.

Because you know, down deep in my heart, when all is said and done, I still live under the illusion that basically people think of me as an up-and-coming young actor.

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.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

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.

We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody.

First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.

The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?

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.

The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.

The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusion. It makes them impossible. It is a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdale's.

...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.

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

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.

Another great illusion that woman must ... destroy . .. is the impurity of sex, the realisation in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex - except in the mental attitude toward 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.

To a father who loves his children victor has no charms. When the heart speaks, glory itself is an illusion.

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

"Fun to drive" is a pleasant illusion in most places robustly inhabited where "safe to drive" makes much more sense.

He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.

Reality, for all intents and purposes, is just life - the real world, pure and uncut, shot straight to the vein of our souls every day we draw breath. Whether it's good or bad, it's still reality; the opposite of illusion, the foe of fantasy, and the anchor that keeps us stuck on this plane. And thank Buddha it does, because some people need it in huge doses.

The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.

The outer drama in the world is going to escalate, and what they [the Pleiadians] are saying is to come back to your heart and don't participate in the drama. Witness it, but understand that this illusion on the Earth plane is accelerating because of where we are in our evolution.

Its really easy to get colors right. Its really hard to get black - and neutrals - right. Black is certainly a color but its also an illusion.

The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.