Quotes About Illusions

It is no use dealing with illusions and make-believes. We must look at the facts. The world ... is too dangerous for anyone to be able to afford to nurse illusions. We must look at realities.

Nothing goes on forever. I think that's one of the illusions of life. When I talk about my life being an extension of my dreams and fantasies, there's a tendency to think of them as immature. I live in a mature world. The majority of the people in this society live with delusions and illusions much more irrational and hurtful than mine. They deal with mortality, with fantasies relating to heaven and hell, and they don't really deal with their problems at all.

Science and technology were often used by [the magician of old], even before they came into the marketplace on a mass basis. For example, prior to the moving picture going into theatre, magicians were using the technique of images in motion as illusions in their shows. At that time the process was so new, an audience perceived it as magic. Also in the early stages of holograms magicians would use these images to baffle and mystify their fans. Hence, you always need to stay one step ahead of the technology game to "WOW" the audience.

These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly. Fashion is about dreams and illusions, and no one wants to see round women.

A man loses his illusions first, his teeth second, and his follies last.

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.

Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.

Do you want a sign that you're asleep? Here it is: you're suffering. Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.

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

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.

One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.

The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic. They, too, have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight.

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.

Let's call this then, only half facetiously, a new patristic, in which the intellectual is charged with the task not only to denounce error and unmask illusions, and not only to incarnate the mechanisms of new practices of knowledge, but also, together with others in a process of co-research, to produce a new truth. -- Commonwealth, 118

Many other means there be, that promise the foreknowledge of things to come: besides the raising up and conjuring of ghosts departed, the conference also with familiars and spirits infernal. And all these were found out in our days, to be no better than vanities and false illusions.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

I had no illusions that my career would be any longer than three years tops.

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

Ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts.

safety and love are both illusions!

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

Lulled by stupefying illusions, the world is asleep in the cradle of infancy, dreaming away the hours.

The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the “divine irresponsibility” of the condemned man.

Playing with various approaches may be due to resistance to going within, to the fear of having to abandon the illusion of being something or somebody in particular.Of all the affections the love of oneself comes first. Light and love are impersonal.When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions.

What if somebody came along who could teach me how my world works and how to control it What if I could meet a super-advanced ... what if a Siddhartha or a Jesus came into our time, with power over the illusions of the world because he knew the reality behind them And what if I could meet him in person, if he were flying a biplane, for instance, and landed in the same meadow with me.

It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.

Hope cherishes no illusions, nor does it yield to cynicism.

In all the illusions, you're the only truth that I need

We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.

Such professions as the soldier and the lawyer ... give ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. ... If you have lost a battle you cannot believe you have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have gotten him off.

So much of what a pet is about for us is that it becomes a vessel for yearnings, dreams, illusions, hopes and so forth. It's a projection of the ultimate innocence and purity. That's why it's hard to see a dog in its dogness. That's why, when some harm comes to a dog, it's much harder for an audience to deal with that, more so than dealing with harm that comes to a child or anything human.

What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.

most of us carry into marriage not only our childlike illusions, but we bring to it as well the demand that it has to be wonderful, because it's supposed to be.

I looked across the river to Manhattan. It was a great view. When Sadie and I had first arrived at Brooklyn House, Amos had told us that magicians tried to stay out of Manhattan. He said Manhattan had other problems--whatever that meant. And sometimes when I looked across the water, I could swear I was seeing things. Sadie laughed about it, but once I thought I saw a flying horse. Probably just the mansion's magic barriers causing optical illusions, but still, it was weird.

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.

Perhaps someday you can have one city as easy to see as Illusions and as hard to forget as Reality.

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.

Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions.

We must escape our illusions of correctness to understand the actions and beliefs of others.

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

If you are forced to confront your fears on a daily basis, they disintegrate, like illusions when viewed up close. Maybe being always protected made me more fearful, and I would later dip cautiously into the outside world, never allowing myself to be submerged completely, and always jerking back into the familiarity of my own life when my senses were overwhelmed. For years I would stand with a foot in each sphere, drawn to the exotic universe that lay on the other side of the portal, wrenched back by the warnings that sounded like alarm bells in my mind.

All goals apart from the means are illusions; becoming is a denial of being.

Forgiveness is key to enchanted love because it is key to living right, period. It is the capacity to see beyond the veil of personality and worldly illusions. No one is perfect or attractive every day. Forgiveness means we are capable of relating to someone on a deeper level than the ordinary self. And that we are committed to doing so no matter what the appearances are, no matter what the situation is.

I've spent a lot of time in the United States and I'm not under any illusions that it's a crime-free nirvana. I'm well aware it has plenty of problems, though they seem to be associated with particular areas.

Om (AUM) is the truth of all truths, the light of all lights and the destroyer of all illusions.

I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author's sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left.