Quotes About Illusions

Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way.

All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.

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

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.

The Art Magicke has rules. It means I have to teach you all my tricks. All the substitutions, the replications, the illusions. How to read minds and palms and leaves. How to disappear and reappear. "How to saw people in half?" "That too." "Nice.

I have lived too long to cherish many illusions about the essential high-mindedness of men when brought into stark confrontation with the issue of control over their security, and their property interests.

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

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

Dive deep into the ocean, Sita, and you will find that the greatest treasures you find are the illusions you leave behind.

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.

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

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene.

[Radical leftist] are never been a majority. We just fell for one of the greatest illusions in modern politics.

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.

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.

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

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.

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

If you want to realize yourselves all your pet illusions must be unmasked.

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.

Misfortune occurs or can occur to anyone, of any sort of character. The eudaimonic has more resources to avoid it (being in autonomous control of his appetites and assumptions) and more resources to deal with it if it occurs (being better able to put it in perspective and maintain his own evenness of self-mastery). Tragedy as a dramatic form is meant to foster the ethos of sophrosyne or moderation, "nothing to excess"; it nurtures a sense of distance from the dominant illusions and delusions that may infect even aristoi.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one.

Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.

Men are not created to know, men are not created to understand ... and our illusions increase with our knowledge.

We are no longer anchored here through the illusions. The Earth itself is transforming to allow us to be unearthed and to make our way differently within the universal community.

A crisis event often explodes the illusions that anchor our lives.

Life attacks us like a blind beast. It swallows up time, the years of our life, it passes like a typhoon and leaves nothing behind. Not even memory, because memory is made of the same swift, ungraspable substance out of which illusions emerge and then disappear.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

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.

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.

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.

Manstein is a man of illusions. ... He believes Hitler will listen to facts.

Looking for a saviour in the sky? Be serious! Know you still not that there ain't any saviour but science! Get rid of your cultural craps and your religious illusions! Be realist! In this universe, only the realists have the chance to save themselves!

At any age we must cherish illusions, consolatory or merely pleasant; in youth, they are omnipresent; in old age we must search for them, or even invent them. But with all that, boredom is their natural and inevitable accompaniment.

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."

Sexuality, for the person who practices tantra, is a marvelous way to experience illusion. Illusion is just another way of seeing things. There are no illusions because there is no self.

Nothing that was real ever died, only names, forms, and illusions.

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

They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)

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.

I am under no illusions. My position, no matter how clearly stated, is likely to be misunderstood.

All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.

I invite you, wholeheartedly, to read books that remind you of your highest self and emancipate you from mental slavery or false beliefs and illusions. The more you invest in attracting books that resonate with the frequency of your true self, the more light you will bring to the world.

I have my dark side. You have your dark side. From the second that we have a brain, there are things that are not right - we are human beings with all these illusions and complexes and everything. That's attractive to me.

[Comedy] is an escape from illusions. The audience is...thinking, 'This bullshit we see and hear all day makes no sense.'

I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind.

The inspiration for my illusions comes from many places. Most often they come from my dreams, or an everyday occurrence in life.