Quotes About Illusions

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

May I say, finally, that I have no illusions of grandeur; quite to the contrary, I am very humble in my knowledge that through forty years of my life my life has been an open book of service to my fellow architects and for the public good.

Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it.

Time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake.

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

Oh yes, I have learned much from Tremorlor, and so assume a like strategy. Silence, a faint mocking smile suggesting I know more than I do, an air of mystery, yes, and fell knowledge. None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions!

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.

Worrying, obsessing, and controlling are illusions. They are tricks we play on ourselves.

Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness.

And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.

Photography is a great adventure in thinking and looking, a wonderful magic toy that miraculously manages to combine our adult awareness with the fairy-tale world of childhood, a never-ending journey through great and small, through variations and the realm of illusions and appearances, a labyrinthine and specular place of multitudes and simulation.

The true laboratory is the mind, where behind illusions we uncover the laws of truth.

What kind of god is it that some human brain can shatter the illusions that have been built up around such a deity? God's a mystery. I'll never be able to tell you what God is.

The only person with you all your life is you. Your parents die. Things inside you die — illusions, gushes of personality. Only you can sort yourself out. Yourself may not be all you need, but it’s all you’ve got.

A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.

That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.

In my later novels, I systematically used the convention, and then a moment came - when did it come? With The Book of Illusions, maybe - I thought, I don't need them anymore, I don't need them, I want to integrate the dialogue into the text.

I do not wish to grow old, to outlive my illusions. Only a short respite from cares and sorrow, a brief time of flowers, and music, and love, and laughter, and ecstatic tears.

The technological age we're in now is the perfect forum for constant misdirection and constant distraction. I ultimately think it's a war to keep people from realizing the true nature of themselves and the true nature of life. All the things people are in pursuit of now, in 2014, are total illusions. It just destroys people's happiness.

David Brin is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions.

These critics with the illusions they've created about artists - it's like idol worship. They only like people when they're on their way up... I cannot be on the way up again.

That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.

safety and love are both illusions!

Spirituality is not primarily about values and ethics, not about exhortations to do right or live well. The spiritual traditions are primarily about reality...an effort to penetrate the illusions of the external world and to name its underlying truth.

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.

Bright and illustrious illusions!

There's no point in clinging to illusions.

When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more.

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

These are illusions of popular history which successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumpths; a good deed is its own rewards; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

The worst was relizing that I’d lost him for nothing because he’d been rght about all of it-- vampires, my parents, everything. He’d told me my parents lied. I yelled at him for it. He forgave me. He told me vampires were killers. I told him they weren’t, even after one stalked Raquel. He told me Charity was dangerous. I didn’t listen, and she killed Courtney. He told me vampires were treacherous, and did I get the message? Not until my illusions had been destroyed by my parents’ confession.

I have no illusions. Of course, Russia is massively upgrading its military. We know that Russia is pursuing a policy of expansion. This is of course a cause for concern among Eastern European countries.

All problems are illusions of the mind.

It isn't so much that God is the unified state of consciousness that each of us came from and will return to, but more so that God is the creative energy flowing between all states of consciousness. God is in the land beyond the mountains, but God is also in the mountains and in the valley of illusions cradled within the mountains. God is not one thing or another, rather God flows between and through all things.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

The president(Obama) comparing him to a kid in the back of a classroom, I think, is very indicative of the president's lack of appreciation of who Vladimir Putin is. He's an old KGB colonel that has no illusions about our relationship, does not care about a relationship with the United States, continues to oppress his people, continues to act in an autocratic fashion.

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."

People do not marry people, not real ones anyway; they marry what they think the person is; they marry illusions and images. The exciting adventure of marriage is finding out who the partner really is.

None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! A mantle of marble hiding a crumbling core of sandstone. See how they stare at me, wondering, all wondering, at my secret wellspring of wisdom...' Let's kill him,' Crokus muttered, 'if only to put him out of our misery.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

I am fortunate to have the resources to have many methods to do each of my illusions.

There is only truth to be found - no lies, no shams, no illusions, no hypocrisy. Just a truthful place, where all beings are governed by a set of perfect laws that have never changed and never will.

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?