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?

Ive said its a little bit like a magician performing for a convention of magicians... all the magicians in the audience watching this illusion-Do they see the illusion, or do they see the device that made the illusion? Probably they see a little of both.

Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.

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.

Truth is only an illusion we have forgotten is an illusion.

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

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

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.

When you interact with another, an illusion is part of this dynamic. This illusion allows each soul to perceive what it needs to understands in order to heal.

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.

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.

If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.

How does it feel? I feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes. And you've left your wallet at home. When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.

It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity.

When the dimensional shift gets to a certain level, guess what? The illusion won't be able to remain stable anymore, and so people will simply wake up and remember who they are! That's going to happen to a certain group of people.

All time is eternal, moving inexorably toward an end which we believe is a result of our actions, but over which our control is mere illusion.

The trick was looking past the illusion, because the exit was never as far away as it seemed.

Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn't paid at the cash register, it's charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it's charged to your health.

It is an illusion to suppose that a Dictator makes himself; at most he seizes an opportunity made for him by passive, stupid, incompetent, and above all, unsatisfied and fearful men.

We enjoy this illusion of continuity and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life, but the end of memories

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

Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.

We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day.

free time is an illusion. It's what you get when you die and the gods reward you for a life spent working from dawn until midnight.

We trained hard ... but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

To talk about something like prostitution, the other person then becomes the wild card that will have a response, and it may not be the response you want. Sometimes I think saying it would be selfish to tell them is still being under the illusion that you have all the power. You say it would be selfish to tell them, when in fact you're scared that in telling them, it gives them the power to do what they might want to do because once they know, they become somebody who could be reactive.

The fresh start is always an illusion but a necessary one.

I would warn against too much of a radical devotion to rationality. Rationality is an illusion, an invented concept, a construct from the mind of man. It is not a property of the universe. Rationality may be a useful tool when it suits our purposes, however, it is merely a measuring stick, calibrated against what we know of the nature of the universe - all of which may or may not be completely inaccurate.

The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.

The illusion that consumption - and its correlative, income - is desirable probably stems from too great preoccupation with what Knight calls "one-use goods," such as food and fuel, where the utilization and consumption of the good are tightly bound together in a single act or event. ... any economy in the consumption of fuel that enables us to maintain warmth or to generate power with lessened consumption again leaves us better off. ... there is no great value in consumption itself.

A beautiful country is a dream-like illusion. It is senseless to cling to it. Unless the inner forces of negative emotions are conquered, strife with outer enemies will never end.

I don't know if this is an illusion but I would love to be able to take my card-throwing skills and be able to puncture a watermelon. Now I know I can take this question and say, "I would want to solve the economic problems in the world" - but I want to stick that card in that watermelon.

Reason is the illusion of reality

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.

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

Control is an illusion.

Ask most people who live in a home and have a mortgage on it whether they own their own home and the answer is almost guaranteed to be a resounding 'yes'. Yet it's the wrong answer. Technically speaking, until they have paid the mortgage off, they don't own it. Herein lies the difference between reality and illusion, between ownership and control. This confusion lies not only at the individual level, but also at the heart of government thinking.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.

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.

I mean, the thought of someone spending $20 to come and see me and saying 'Oh, I prefer the record and she's completely shattered the illusion' really upsets me. It's such a big deal that people come give me their time.

Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.

That's the rational premise behind my spending hours of billable time adjusting my Facebook preferences. The real reason, of course, for all this stuff, is that it provides a way to blow off work you should be doing, while creating the illusion that you are achieving something.

I have no use whatsoever for projections or forecasts. They create an illusion of apparent precision. The more meticulous they are, the more concerned you should be. We never look at projections, but we care very much about, and look very deeply at, track records. If a company has a lousy track record, but a very bright future, we will miss the opportunity.

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can't now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

There is no coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.

It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may. Personally I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born, yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.

Think of your career as your ministry. Make your work an expression of love, in service to mankind. Within the worldly illusion, we all have different jobs. Some of us are artists, some of us are business people, some of us are scientists. But in the real world that lies beyond all this, we all have the same job: to minister to human hearts.