Quotes About Illusion

My friends, I tell you repeatedly that the illusion that Life creates is very, very intelligent. The illusion itself is intelligent! Just understand how intelligent the intelligence must be in order to create an intelligent illusion. The intelligent illusion is so intelligent it will appear real to man every moment of his daily life!

Illusion starts between the ears. If the person doing illusion doesn't believe it, then the audience doesn't believe it. Seeing the picture in your head will allow the audience to see it in their heads.

It is no wonder if Art frequently prefers Illusion to Truth: for Illusion is her servant, but Truth her mistress.

Wherever desire exists ego exists, and wherever ego exists illusion exists because ego is the greatest illusion there is. Even in a beggar who has nothing else you will find the same ego as you will find in Alexander the Great, because desiring is the same. Alexander the Great may have much money and much power, that does not matter; he is still desiring. The beggar may not have anything, but he is also desiring.

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.

A plane is a bad place for an all-out sleep, but a good place to begin rest and recovery from the trip to the faraway places you've been, a decompression chamber between Here and There. Though a plane is not the ideal place really to think, to reassess or reevaluate things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often the illusion will suffice.

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.

In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.

In endeavor itself there is a certain dynamic entertainment, affording an illusion of useful purpose. With achievement the illusion is dispelled. Man's greatest accomplishment is to produce change. The only good in life is study, because study is an endeavor that never reaches fulfillment. It busies a man to the end of his days, and it aims at the only true reality in all this world of shams and deceits.

Do not feel that you are destined to enlightenment in this life. You have no idea. This is an illusion of selfhood. It's gross ignorance and egotism.

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.

We're left with so little to go on. Only the present is full enough to seem complete, and even that is an optical illusion. The moment is bleeding off the page. We live on the precipice of our perceptions. At the edge of every living instant, the world shears away like a cliff of ice into the sea of what is forgotten.

Performance-enhancing drugs are an illusion. I wish I had never gotten involved with steroids. It was wrong. It was stupid.

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.

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

The choreographer and the dancer must remember
that they reach the audience through the eye.
It's the illusion created which convinces the audience,
much as it is with the work of a magician.

You have been professing yourself reluctant to throw off your load of illusion because truth was uncertain. Well, it is certain now, yet the burden still weighs you down, while other people are given wings on freer shoulders, people who have not worn themselves out with research, nor spent a decade and more reflecting on these questions.

For nearly a hundred years, we have known that the material world is an illusion. Everything that seems solid - a rock, a tree, your body - is actually 99.999% empty space.

Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.

Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity.

The magic of comics is that there are three people involved in any comic. There's whoever's writing it and whoever's drawing it. And then there's whoever's reading it because they are creating the movement. They are creating the illusion of time passing.

Drop your identification with the illusion of separateness.

Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there…the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

The greatest illusion is that mankind has limitations.

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.

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.

Awakening is waking up from the daytime dream and realizing that who you thought you were is not limited to thought, emotion or form. Beyond the imaginary seeker, beyond concepts and beliefs, there is a field of innocence and purity. We are this deep peace and sacredness, which is absolute and beyond all intellectual understanding. I invite you to recognize this Essence of Being and to directly realize the illusion of all psychological suffering due to misidentification, misperception of separation and attachment to conditioned thought.

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

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.

Time is an optical illusion- never quite as soild or strong as we think it is

Ugly. Is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion.

We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile.

Take all the Syrians, for example. They are where they need to be. They don't need saving. They are having their experiences and they're completing what they need to complete within this human element, in this complete illusion.

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

Through my blue fingers, pink grains are falling, haphazard, random, a disorganized stream of silicone that seems pregnant with the possibility of every conceivable shape… But this is illusion. Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future.

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.

My theory about meeting people,' he said,'is that it's better not to make a really good first impression. Because it's all downhill from there. You're always having to live up to that first impression, which was just an illusion.

We live alone, we die alone. Everything else is just 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.

The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany.... One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.

And that is enough to raise your thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride… Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

Certainly, possessions, money, and power can give a momentary thrill, the illusion of being happy, but they end up possessing us and making us always want to have more, never satisfied. ‘Put on Christ’ in your life, place your trust in him, and you will never be disappointed!

I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.

I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.