Quotes About Illusions

The master and the student on the journey to mastery, knows that the illusions are the illusions, decides why they are there, and then consciously creates what will be experienced next within the self through the illusions. When facing any life experience, there is a formula, a process, through which you may choose to move through mastery. Simply make the following statements: One, nothing in my world is real. Two, The meaning of everything is the meaning I give it. Three, I am who I say I am, and my experience is what I say it is. This is how to work with the illusions of life.

The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

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.

It is no use dealing with illusions and make-believes. We must look at the facts. The world ... is too dangerous for anyone to be able to afford to nurse illusions. We must look at realities.

Time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake.

Each 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.

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.

Life is a process of losing our illusions, until we finally lose the illusion that we're alive.

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.

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

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

Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.

Don'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.

..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.

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

It's only when you become love - in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments - that you will "know." As you identify less and less with the "me," you will be more at ease with everybody and with everything.

A nation like China has become one of the biggest production fields for exporting cheap labor, which also re-questions our history and past, re-questions human desire, and the human illusions of the past.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities - a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces - a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.

Our experience is composed rather of illusions lost than of wisdom acquired.

What is experience? A poor little hut constructed from the ruins of the palace of gold and marble called our illusions.

Dying visions of angels and Christ and God and heaven are confined to credibly good men. Why do not bad men have such visions? They die of all sorts of diseases; they have nervous temperaments; they even have creeds and hopes about the future which they cling to with very great tenacity; why do not they rejoice in some such glorious illusions when they go out of the world?

The commonsense rules of the "real world" are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.

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

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

I had no illusions that my career would be any longer than three years tops.

Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.

Pure physical sensation, social status, sexual attraction, and feeling like a winner are generally superficial, which is why people hunger for them repeatedly.The only goal worth attaining is complete freedom to be yourself, without illusions and false beliefs.The past and the future exist only in imagination. Everything you did before has no reality. Everything you will do afterward has no reality. Only the thing you are doing now is real.

Lulled by stupefying illusions, the world is asleep in the cradle of infancy, dreaming away the hours.

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.

There's no point in clinging to illusions.

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

... semantics ... is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions of being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense

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

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

When you have examined all the illusions of life and know that there isn't any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being. You accept the idea that it is all mask and illusion and that people are in disguise. You see the crumbl

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

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.

It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

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

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.

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.

Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses?

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.

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.

Let there be no illusions about the difficulty of forming this kind of a national community. It's tough, difficult, not easy. But a spirit of harmony will survive in America only if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny.