Quotes About Illusions

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions.

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.

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

A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings.

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 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.

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.

God is not disillusioned with us. He never had any illusions to begin with.

Love is what's left when being in love is gone, okay? It's when you care about someone and you hope they're happy, but you're not under any illusions about them. Maybe that kind of love is not exciting and passionate and all those things that fade with time. All those things that you're so keen on. But in the end it's the only kind of love that really matters.

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.

Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now - in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.

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

What I've never wanted to do was allow myself to be put in a box, so I've tried to do a lot of different things so this is a step in trying to do something different so we'll see how it goes. I'm under no illusions that this is slam-dunk. I did the best I could and that's all I can rely on.

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.

Man did not address his inquiries to the earth on which he stood until a remarkably late stage in the development of his desire for knowledge. And the answers he received to the questions, "Where do I come from?", "What is man?", although they made him poorer by a few illusions, gave him in compensation a knowledge of his past that is vaster than he could ever have dreamed. For it emerged that the history of life was his history too.

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

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.

When illusions are shattered by truth, talent is set free.

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

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course—for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without ... let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine - for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.

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.

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.

The fact that man produces a concept "I" besides the totality of his mental and emotional experiences or perceptions does not prove that there must be any specific existence behind such a concept. We are succumbing to illusions produced by our self-created language, without reaching a better understanding of anything. Most of so-called philosophy is due to this kind of fallacy.

In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.

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.

Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.

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.

Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.

It's what we live for, to be able to make great illusions. The thing about 'Entourage' is everything we do is realistic. We go to the real places, we shoot on location. We get the real people. It's a perfect marriage between fact and fiction.

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.

Possession, it is true, crowns exertion with rest; but it is only in the illusions of fancy that it has power to charm us.

A [wo]man who is unconscious of [her/]himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.

If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle.

People who have realized that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations.

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

The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

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.

Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.

We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

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.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.

Modern man's difficulties, dangerous beliefs and feelings of loneliness, spiritual emptiness,and personal weakness are caused by his illusions about, and separation from, the natural world.

The illusions it had woven for me had taken place only in my head. The battle had been invisible to the naked eye, but the hard ones are.