Top 100 Illusion The Quotes
#1. It is a mistake to imagine that you can awaken in any kind of permanent way. There is only NOW and so you can only be awake now. Even the idea of permanence is an illusion. The question to ask is 'Am I awake and fully present NOW?' That question arises and is answered in perfect silence.
Leonard Jacobson
#2. The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real. The triumph of realism over magic, of is over seems.
Ian McEwan
#3. The only thing that keeps us from a place of joy is an illusion, the illusion of fear.
Molly Friedenfeld
#4. Things are just that - things. They don't make us who we are. They make us look better on the outside, even when we're hollow on the inside. They're an illusion - the shiny objects that distract us from the really important things.
Chelle Bliss
#5. There are other relations besides reality, which the mind is capable of grasping and which also are primary, like chance, illusion, the fantastic, the dream.
Louis Aragon
#6. Glamour is a beautiful illusion - the word 'glamour' originally meant a literal magic spell - that promises to transcend ordinary life and make the ideal real. It depends on a special combination of mystery and grace. Too much information breaks the spell.
Virginia Postrel
#7. Exercise is the most awful illusion. The secret is a lot of aspirin and marrons glaces.
Noel Coward
#8. Psychoanalysis is a new version of the ancient theme shared by all the great religions. The loss of illusion, the giving up of attachment to a false reality, the inevitability of suffering and expiation are all present in psychoanalysis. Every person who seeks analysis is on a personal pilgrimage.
Margaret Arden
#9. And it only seems fitting that, in this moment of illusion, the words just come out of me. I love you, too.
Lauren DeStefano
#10. Remember that even though the dream may be an illusion, the dreaming is always real.
B.E. Scully
#11. If I know this, I ought to be able to escape the stupider kinds of illusion. The absolute nature of things is independent of my senses (which are all I have to perceive with), and what I perceive is an image of my own psyche.
Robertson Davies
#12. The dilemma of Brechtian performance is that, for all of Brecht's emphasis on rationality and the undermining of theatrical illusion, the actor must convincingly portray something that she is not.
Philip Auslander
#13. Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.
Emil Cioran
#14. Asking a question simply implies that you already know the answer. However, the question that you are asking may simply be an illusion. The beauty of the answer truly blooms, when you ask the right question.
Lionel Suggs
#15. He also saw that matter is a mirror - everything is a mirror that reflects light and creates images of that light - and the world of illusion, the Dream, is just like smoke which doesn't allow us to see what we really are. "The real us is pure love, pure light," he said.
Miguel Ruiz
#16. Everything is just electricity and magnetism; everything is only an illusion. The reality is in the spiritual plane.
Lobsang Rampa
#17. You do not exist to serve the illusion. The illusion exists to serve you.
Lauren Zimmerman
#18. Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for any one but inspire them?
Bob Dylan
#19. The coals seem to glow with such life, but she knew it was all an illusion.The embers were nothing but the last breath of death. I am like this fire, she thought.I look alive but inside I feel dead.
Cassandra Samuels
#20. And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.
Paul Krugman
#21. It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).
Steven Pinker
#22. Upon the dark road you are travelling, do not seek out the light, the illusion, the fallacy and incessant need for all things external. Have no fear, take the darkness as your comfort because you are the light shining in the dark.
You just need to find the spark.
L.J. Vanier
#23. It's all kind of a big illusion: the white picket fence and the perfect marriage and the kids. Check that box off, check that box off, and move forward.
Sarah McLachlan
#24. I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire - whatever you want to call it - that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening.
Eavan Boland
#25. In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of changing lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and distortions.
G.K. Chesterton
#26. Purity is an illusion. The idea of purity has been used as an excuse for calamities like honor killings, bride burnings, child molestation. Purification is genocide.
Alice Glass
#27. Let us be under no illusion. The Jewish spirit, which was responsible for the alliance of large-scale capital with Marxism and was the driving force behind so many anti-Spanish revolutionary agreements, will not be got rid of in a day.
Francisco Franco
#28. Past, present and future are illusions, or to put it another way, to separate past, present, and future is an illusion.... The present is the opening in time...
Deepak Chopra
#29. Once I go on stage, the atmosphere is totally theatrical. The greater the illusion, the greater the intensity of the excitement it creates.
Todd Rundgren
#30. Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
#31. Silent. So it should be. You have no place in this world, Luthiel. And there is no other.' Zalos reached out and lifted a few strands of her hair. 'Bright songs and the magic of hope are but a dangerous illusion. The fake comfort of witches charms.
Robert Fanney
#32. My illusion, the idea of a soul mate, was so entrenched in my fantasy that the thought of letting him go, wrecked me.
M.R. Field
#33. Death IS an illusion. The body dies. The soul/spirit lives forever. YOU are the sum total of ALL you survey. Who would know you and not know your name? Kat Kaelin
Kat Kaelin
#34. There is illusion, the way you see things now, thinking that there is a tomorrow, there is a today, there is time and that there is life and death. Those are just appearances
Frederick Lenz
#35. Tej seemed such a sunny personality, much of the time
these flashes of dark were like a crack in the sky, shocking and wrong. Reminding him that the daylight was the illusion, the scattering of light by the atmosphere, and the endless night was the permanent default behind it all.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#36. This cognitive illusion was first noted in 1968 by the mathematician William Feller in his classic textbook on probability: "To the untrained eye, randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster."33 Here are a few examples of the cluster illusion. The
Steven Pinker
#37. Everything in the world is maya, an illusion. The ultimate truth one has to realise is that we actually need nothing. Because to possess an illusion is as good as possessing nothing.
Amish Tripathi
#38. Otherwise the silence in the room was profound, the silence of places Brian had not yet been: gazing at the lifeless body of a beloved, the echo of a lost illusion, the tinnitus of betrayal.
Rafael Yglesias
#39. We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?
Iris Murdoch
#40. If you are feeling low, or trampled, unappreciated, or forgotten ... and you are reading this, realize it is an illusion ... the hope is real ... you are valued ... and what lies ahead ... is brilliance.
Tom Althouse
#41. The fog of illusion, the fog of confusion is hanging all over the world.
Van Morrison
#42. You are the illusion. The person in the mirror is real.
Isaac Hooke
#43. It's almost like an optical illusion, 'The Hobbit.' You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.
Peter Jackson
#44. I have always believed that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an illusion; the illusion is the tunnel itself.
Sam Harris
#45. The novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?
Milan Kundera
#46. Anything you can say, think, feel, trust or feel is untrue - is an illusion. The fact that there are these things is an illusion.
Frederick Lenz
#47. I'm looking for the binding energy of a look
a crop of reflections to be reaped
in a winter of thorn
when icebergs of illusion will melt
to be served at high tea
and the spaces between the poles pinned down
Nancy Peters
#48. True independence is an illusion; no one matures in a vacuum. We have heroes, we see villains, and ultimately we try to walk the path that's our own, through an ideological valley whose landmarks have already been described and claimed by others.
Nicolas Wilson
#49. The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society - and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.
William H. Whyte
#50. Goliath symbolizes the vanity and the illusions of this world. They disappear in a puff
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#51. The nature of illusion is that, when you see through it, it disappears.
Mooji
#52. We must remember that we do not observe nature as it actually exists, but nature exposed to our methods of perception. The theories determine what we can or cannot observe ... Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.
Albert Einstein
#53. You know how in football, guys throw defenses, and the defense throws you a look, but the look is not really what it is - it's only made to fool you. It's the same thing with drugs. The drug is only an illusion to draw you in.
Rick Ross
#54. The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.
Sydney Smith
#55. If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself ... that a tiger is an optical illusion
well, he will find out he is wrong. The tiger will himself intervene in the discussion, in a manner which will be in every sense conclusive.
Lord Byron
#56. Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#57. The illusion of depth in a character is created simply by withholding information from an audience. A character will seem complex and intriguing only if we don't know the reasons why.
Eleanor Catton
#58. I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
David Knopfler
#59. You can only succeed. You cannot fail. Failure is impossible; it is an illusion. Nothing is a failure. Nothing. Everything moves the human story, and hence the process of evolution, forward. Everything advances you on your journey.
Neale Donald Walsch
#60. The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be.
Eckhart Tolle
#61. Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in what is not a relief from what is. Now the real, now illusion is our refuge; and the soul has finally no other resource but the true, which is her weapon
and falsehood, which is her armor.
Paul Valery
#63. The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
Gustave Flaubert
#64. If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.
Johann Most
#65. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#66. The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
Gustave Le Bon
#67. The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
Jorge Luis Borges
#68. As an actor, the only thing we can do is play the truth at that moment. Because at any point in time if you play the future, or you play that you know something that the audience does not know, it kills the illusion of reality.
Anthony Mackie
#69. The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
Simone De Beauvoir
#70. Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour.
J.M. Bernstein
#71. The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
#72. Even if I have already peaked, I have to believe I can improve. I wake up every morning, and go to practice, with the illusion that I'm going to get better that day.
Rafael Nadal
#73. The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
Terence McKenna
#74. Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.
Aleister Crowley
#75. A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.
H.L. Mencken
#76. He who gives away shall have real gain. He who subdues himself shall be free; he shall cease to be a slave of passions. The righteous man casts off evil, and by rooting out lust, bitterness, and illusion do we reach Nirvana.
Buddha
#77. God made the Illusion look Real and the Real an Illusion !
Rumi
#78. Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
Tennessee Williams
#79. It seems to me, that the only Objects of the abstract Sciences or of Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledge beyond these Bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion.
David Hume
#80. We can create the world where we are with the ones we want to love so easily.
Taylor Nadeau
#81. Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion - and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined.
Daniel Kahneman
#82. When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.
Susan Blackmore
#83. It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may.
H.P. Lovecraft
#84. There is no coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence.
Alan Moore
#85. There is no death! Death is very much like sunset. It is only an appearance. For, when the sun sets here, it rises elsewhere. In reality, the sun never sets. Likewise, death is only an illusion, an appearance. For, what is death here is birth elsewhere. For life is endless.
Dada Vaswani
#86. Soup not only warms you and is easy to swallow and to digest, it also creates the illusion in the back of your mind that Mother is there.
Marlene Dietrich
#87. In the society of illusion, reality must manifest itself. The story songs of Joel Rafael are that manifestation ... the essence of minstrel.
John Trudell
#88. Where do we people go if not towards the perfection of our own illusion?
Sorin Cerin
#89. The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
Walter Lippmann
#90. Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.
Henry A. Kissinger
#91. All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#92. Matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, and that time is a material substance.
Madeleine L'Engle
#93. One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance. All sorts of things.
Jean Rhys
#94. Debate is an attempt to cling to the illusion of control provided by a point of view designed to keep the ego in place; dialogue is an attempt to dance with the unknown at the risk of losing what we think we know.
Oli Anderson
#95. I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.
Parker Palmer
#96. The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#97. I found the Course essential in my struggle for personal transformation. It helped me recognize that I really did have a choice of experiencing peace or conflict, and that this choice is always between accepting truth or illusion.
Gerald G. Jampolsky
#98. The secret to film is that it's an illusion.
George Lucas
#99. So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.
Sol Luckman
#100. You should start your life with the illusion that you are completely in control of what you do. You should finish life with the recognition that, all in all, you got better than you deserved.
David Brooks
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