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?

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

All these years I had been sustained by an illusion-happiness through victory- and now that illusion was burned to ashes. I was no more happier, no more fullfilled, for all my achievements. Finally I saw through the clouds I saw that I had never learned how to enjoy life, only how to achieve. All my life i had been busy seeking happiness, but never finding it or sustaining it.

I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice... The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.

Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but "lies asleep."

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

Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire..I've tried. I've tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions..Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.

Realize all this as illusion, realize that within the illusion is the Real.

None of this has ever been or will ever be; all is an appearance, all is an illusion. Illusions are truth. All illusions are real. We say illusion, meaning that they're shadows.

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

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

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.

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

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.

For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

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.

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

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

Confidence is the illusion born of accidental success.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

Human life has no meaning independent of itself. There is no cosmic force or deity to give it meaning or significance. There is no ultimate destiny for man. Such a belief is an illusion of humankind's infancy. The meaning of life is what we choose to give it. Meaning grows out of human purposes alone. Nature provides us with an infinite range of opportunities, but it is only our vision and our action that select and realize those that we desire.

"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 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.

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 least livable life is the one without coherence-nothing connects, nothing means anything. Stories make connections. They allow us to see our past, our present, and our future as interrelated and purposeful.... The stories we value most reassure us that life is worth the pain, that meaning is not an illusion, and that others share our experience with us.

And once again I believe that nothing that's important really becomes lost. We just delude ourselves, thinking that we own the things, the moments and the others. Still with me are all the dead persons who I loved, all the friends who turned away, all the happy days that faded. I lost nothing but the illusion that everything could be mine forever.

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

Well, I thought I was so tranquil! I need to give up that illusion! There is decidedly no rest to be had in this world.

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.

Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.

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.

We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities - courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning - whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage.

Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.

The essence of all practice is to be cool. Life is not worth getting excited about because whatever you perceive is an illusion.

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.

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 superior thing ... was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual.

Love is the chariot of emotion which takes us to our beloved. When we love we see beyond the prism of illusion.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.

Men should never marry their muse. It ruins the illusion.

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 coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence.

I love Jonathan Adler but more importantly I love throws. To clarify, a throw is not to be confused with a blanket. A blanket is to be slept under, a throw is to accent a chair or sofa and give the illusion that in some scenario someone might rest underneath it. In reality, this scenario does not exist and I never want it to.

Like a lot of writers, I just got sick to death of conventional fiction. I absolutely couldn't stand the illusion of reality and plot. I just couldn't stomach it.