Quotes About Illusions

Democracy, Republic: What do these words signify? What have they changed in the world? Have men become better, more loyal, kinder? Are the people happier? All goes on as before, as always. Illusions, illusions.

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.

One of the great illusions of our time is that hurrying will buy us more time.

God's revelation... unmasks our illusions about ourselves. It exposes our pride, our individualism, our self-centeredness - in short, our sin. But worship also offers forgiveness, healing, transformation, motivation, and courage to work in the world for God's justice and peace - in short, salvation in its largest sense.

It is one of the most fatal illusions that, by substituting negotiations between states or organized groups for competition for markets or for raw materials, international friction would be reduced. This would merely put a contest of force in the place of what can only metaphorically be called the "struggle" of competition and would transfer to powerful and armed states, subject to no superior law, the rivalries which between individuals had to be decided without recourse to force.

Illusions of grandeur are not the same as visions of greatness.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

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!

Everybody sooner or later has to drop the luggage and the baggage of illusions.

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.

You see a lot of interesting visual irony on movie sets all the time, you know duality, set illusions, the reality, all that stuff. You play with interesting materials that you couldn't afford to otherwise. You meet interesting people that you work with, have special machinists or mold makers and make-up people, and people who make prosthetic appliances for actress' faces. It's really interesting kind of witch's brew of people in that business, aside from the sleeze bags you hear about on the financial end.

I have never had illusions about the value of my individual contribution! I realized early that what a man or a woman does is built on what those who have gone before have done, that its real value depends on making the matter in hand a little clearer, a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain. One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.

I cannot agree with any astronomer who insists that all of these things are mirages, planets, clouds, or illusions. The majority of the people are articulate enough to tell their stories and sincere enough to make depositions before notaries public. Even scientists concede that these folk saw something.

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

Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination of joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love.

If we venture beyond the pale of Scripture, we are...exposed to all the illusions of imagination and enthusiasm.

The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.

When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, that is the heart of science.

The trouble with illusions is that you aren't aware you have any until they are taken away from you.

The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions... I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.

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

The inner censor of the mind of the true believer completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorizes his own conscience into submission;he carries his private Iron Curtain inside his skull, to protect his illusions against the intrusion of reality.

One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.

The mind has its illusions as the sense of sight; and in the same manner that the sense of feeling corrects the latter, reflection and calculation correct the former.

The feminine vanity-case is the graveyard of masculine illusions.

It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Like a cross between Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee's Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films—like those conversations you have in which you realize only too late that what you actually talking about and what you think you are talking about are not the same thing at all. With Rombes, Two Dollar Radio deftly demonstrates why it is rapidly becoming the go-to press for innovative fiction.

I have no illusions at all about being a sex symbol. None of my former girlfriends ever thought of me that way, and I don't have any packs of women chasing me down the street like a Brad Pitt or someone like that.

We all need illusions. That's why we love movies.

I had great faith in Irish actors, that they'd be hip to the whole theatre thing, and they are. I had no illusions of coming over here as some kind of big shot. It's been a learning experience for me too.

Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery

Life is beautiful. Really, it is. Full of beauty and illusions. Life is great. Without it, you'd be dead.

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.

At thirty I lived in a world where death wasn't immediately real; it was always something "out there." My deeply held illusions of immortality - a product of my very conservative religious upbringing - were still pretty much intact.

The idea that positive illusions are in the service of sef-esteem virtually requires that they stay in check. If one develops substantially unrealistic expectations regarding the future that greatly exceed what one is actually able to accomplish, then one is set up for failure and disappointment, leading to lower self-esteem.

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.

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

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

All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.

We're all travelling heavy with illusions.

The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.

A woman can't be, until a girl dies. . . . I mean the sprites that girls are, so different from us, all their fancies, their illusions, their flower world, the dreams they live in.

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

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.

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.