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.

At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

Reality even when it is sad is better than illusions. Illusions are at the mercy of any winds that blow. Real happiness must come from within, from a fixed purpose and faith in one's fellow men.

What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better.

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.

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.

I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.

The flowers of life are but illusions. How many fade away and leave no trace.

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.

Reason dissipates the illusions of life, but does not console us for their departure.

Sweet pliability of man's spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which cheat expectation and sorrow of their weary moments! - long - long since had ye numbered out my days, had I not trod so great a part of them upon this enchanted ground. When my way is too rough for my feet, or too steep for my strength, I get off it, to some smooth velvet path which fancy has scattered over with rose-buds of delights; and have taken a few turns on it, come back strengthened and refreshed.

..he continues to cling to the forlorn hope that I will turn into one of those swooning females...and fling myself squeeling at him whenever anything happens. Like all men, he clings to his illusions.

Freedom from worries and surcease from strain are illusions that always inhabit the distance.

They were told what they wanted and they believed it. They can only keep their dream alive by being with others like themselves who will mirror their illusions.

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.

Well, I dare not allow myself any illusions, and I am afraid it may never happen that Father and Mother will really appreciate my art. It is not their fault; we do not see the same things with the same eyes, or have the same thoughts raised in us by them. They will never be able to understand what painting is.

I am ever Thine. If Thou cast me out, who shall take me in? If Thou disregard me, who shall look on me? More canst Thou remit, than I commit; more canst Thou spare, than I offend. Let not hurtful pleasures overcome me; at the least let not any perverse habit overwhelm me; From evil and unlawful desires; From vain, hurtful, impure imaginations; from the illusions of evil spirits; from pollutions of soul and of body; Good Lord, deliver 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.

What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.

Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable

The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.

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.

Now that you've reached everything, you must slay this illusion without slaying it - without becoming caught up in the illusion of slaying illusions.

Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.

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.

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

If I live by illusions, you live by excuses.

If you know that everything comes from the mind, don't become attached. Once attached, you're unaware. But once you see your own nature, the entire Canon becomes so much prose. It's thousands of sutras and shastras only amount to a clear mind. Understanding comes in midsentence. What good are doctrines? The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They're not the Way. The Way is wordless. Words are illusions. . . . Don't cling to appearances, and you'll break through all barriers. . . .

I've always found that when you're trying to create illusions with sound, especially in a science fiction or fantasy movie, that pulling sounds from the world around us is a great way to cement that illusion because you can go out and record an elevator in George Lucas's house or something, and it will have that motor sound.

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

Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control. We can love and care for others but we cannot possess our children, lovers, family, or friends. We can assist them, pray for them, and wish them well, yet in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their thoughts and actions, not on our wishes.

Most terrors are but spectral illusions. Only have the courage of the man who could walk up to his spectre seated in the chair before him, and sit down upon it; the horrid thing will not partake the chair with you.

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.

I'm really trying hard not to do anything that has been done before. So knowing everything I can about the legacy of magic challenges my team and I to invent new illusions.

Reason and religion cannot coexist together. If reason exists, then paradise, prophets and all other religiuous illusions disappear.

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

I had no illusions about love anymore. It came, it went, it left casualties or it didn't. People weren't meant to be together forever, regardless of what the songs say.

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.

A neurotic can neither enjoy his illusions nor give them up.

But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction ... One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly from his wihes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.

the most all-around, practical, long-wearing illusions are the ones that you weave yourself.