Popular quotes about Illusions! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 3
For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.
Lorrie MooreThat's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice. I'm traveling heavy with illusions.
Sherman AlexieThe more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world.
Chris HedgesThe task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.
Arthur MillerEach of us believes himself to live directly within the world that surrounds him, to sense its objects and events precisely, and to live in real and current time. I assert that these are perceptual illusions ... Each of us lives within the universe - the prison of his own brain.
Vernon Benjamin MountcastleOh 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!
Steven EriksonI 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.
Ida TarbellThe trouble with illusions is that you aren't aware you have any until they are taken away from you.
Mary Doria RussellDon't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. To live a fulfilled life, we need to keep creating the "what is next", of our lives. Without dreams and goals there is no living, only merely existing, and that is not why we are here.
Mark TwainI believe in the Biblical documents supporting Jesus. But I have no illusions about them. I think they contain many flaws, scribal errors, and so forth and they are only partial or fragmentary.
Anne RiceThe 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.
Arthur Koestler..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.
Barbara MertzWhat happened was simple, even banal: I became naked, died, lost parts of my flesh and most of my ego along with a few illusions such as a belief in the uniqueness of my personal scrap of consciousness and the cosmic importance therof, and went on from there.
MacDonald HarrisI'd always wanted to do these types of things - pieces of magic I could put out not as illusions, but really doing it.
David BlainePerhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.
Kate ChopinIllusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
Barbara KingsolverYou 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.
Terence McKennaLet'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
Michael HardtFilm is a truly magical medium. You can create illusions of reality, make people think they've seen things that they really haven't - like blowing a guy's head off with a shotgun.
Tom SaviniWho's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.
Edward AlbeeIn order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with.
Thomas MertonDon't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Mark TwainThey filled us full of false illusions and promiscuity, and they led us down that class-less road of mediocrity.
Ray DaviesI set out to become the greatest lover in Vienna, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest economist in the world. Alas, for the illusions of youth: as a horseman, I was never really first-rate.
Joseph A. SchumpeterThe way you're singing in your sleep The way you look before you leap The strange illusions that you keep You don't know But I'm noticing The way your touch turns into arcs The way you slide into the dark The beating of my open heart You don't know But I'm noticing
David LevithanOne of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters
Noam ChomskyNow you see. We are all fugitives. We have always been fugitives from the void. Whatever comfort, whatever power we gain from outside of ourselves diminishes us -- because comfort and power, unless they are won from the void inside of us, are illusions that make us forget the emptyness that carries us. When we forget that, we believe we deserve comfort and power and so are capable of any evil. We deserve nothing but what we make of ourselves. We deserve nothing else. And when we understand that, then nothing is enough.
A.A. AttanasioThese 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.
John LennonYouโll join me sooner than you know in a place with . . . no illusions, where the truth is the only architecture, the only color, the only sound--where that which we sense merely on occasion, and which takes us up and gives us the rare and beautiful glimpses of the things we truly love, flows in deep rivers and tumbles about like clouds in the sky.
Mark HelprinThe 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.
Shelley E. TaylorGive 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.
Luke RhinehartThe most important part of our lives-our sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations-takes place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich.
Joseph Wood KrutchLulled by stupefying illusions, the world is asleep in the cradle of infancy, dreaming away the hours.
Mary Baker EddyWhat does it mean to know and experience my own โnothingness?โ It is not enough to turn away in disgust from my illusions and faults and mistakes, to separate myself from them as if they were not, and as if I were someone other than myself. This kind of self-annihilati on is only a worse illusion, it is a pretended humility which, by saying โI am nothingโ I mean in effect โI wish I were not what I am.
Thomas MertonCognitive 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.
Steven PinkerOne thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]
Sigmund FreudThe realization of Truth and Reality can never be created by the mind ... it always comes as a gift of grace. Inquiry clears away misperceptions and illusions, making one available to the movements of grace.
AdyashantiThe worst was relizing that Iโd lost him for nothing because heโd been rght about all of it-- vampires, my parents, everything. Heโd told me my parents lied. I yelled at him for it. He forgave me. He told me vampires were killers. I told him they werenโt, even after one stalked Raquel. He told me Charity was dangerous. I didnโt listen, and she killed Courtney. He told me vampires were treacherous, and did I get the message? Not until my illusions had been destroyed by my parentsโ confession.
Claudia GrayI 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.
Martin SchulzIf 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.
Christopher HitchensWomen are strange little beasts,' he said to Dr. Coutras. 'You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.' He shrugged his shoulders. 'Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.
W. Somerset MaughamYou are a worksmith and who cares for his brothers, whos not seduced by illusions or fair weather friends.
Alanis MorissetteRead day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
Emile M. CioranThe accursed one does not allow the eye of the heart to see the Lord or His saints. He darkens our heart in every way. He scatters faith, oppressing, burning and darkening us inwardly. We must look upon all such actions as illusions and falsehood, and break through this imaginary wall to the Lord, or to His Holy Mother, or His saints. As soon as you break through this wall you will be immediately saved. 'Your faith has made you whole' (Mt. 9:22).
John of Kronstadt