Top 100 Quotes About Illusion
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. You can be in a state of mind for a few seconds and forget that you were ever in any other state of mind. That's what we mean by illusion.
Frederick Lenz
#4. 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
#5. To believe in what you don't know is as true as to believe in what you do know as long as life is an illusion.
Sorin Cerin
#6. Tom hunts alone. While shunned by all he sees, he grows aware that, in reality, life is lived alone. When with a hen, there's only an illusion of sharing; a pretence that life's trials are easier to endure. Even sleep is a barrier that can't be shared.
Peter Gray
#7. Goliath symbolizes the vanity and the illusions of this world. They disappear in a puff
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#8. The nature of illusion is that, when you see through it, it disappears.
Mooji
#9. A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.
Lee Bolman
#10. 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
#11. Nothing pleases me more than when somebody who was awe-inspired to be working with me realizes I'm just another schmuck that they're bored of hanging out with on a set. I love that moment. I like it when that persistent illusion is smashed.
Robert Downey Jr.
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#16. 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
#17. As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.
Henry David Thoreau
#18. 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
#19. Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
#20. 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
#21. There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.
Wallace Stegner
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#26. Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#27. Any fear is an illusion. You think something is standing in your way, but nothing is really there. What is there is an opportunity to do your best and gain some success.
Michael Jordan
#28. All things of this phenomenal world are mere illusion. They are worth neither discussing nor desiring.
Yoshida Kenko
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.
Charles Darwin
#32. 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
#33. What would ever become of Tilly-Valley's religion in that world, with headlights flashing along cemented highways, and all existence dominated by electricity? What would become of old women reading by candlelight? What would become of his own life-illusion, his secret 'mythology,' in such a world?
John Cowper Powys
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.
Simone De Beauvoir
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. A journey is not a cure. It brings an illusion, only, of change, and becomes at best a spartan comfort
Colin Thubron
#41. The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
#42. The only thing that keeps us from a place of joy is an illusion, the illusion of fear.
Molly Friedenfeld
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.
Aleister Crowley
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. What I'm really trying to say is that I believed an armed insurrection could work. After I was shot and went to prison, that ended that illusion. I had time to think.
Huey Newton
#50. God made the Illusion look Real and the Real an Illusion !
Rumi
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. We can create the world where we are with the ones we want to love so easily.
Taylor Nadeau
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Sanity is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency.
N. F. Simpson
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. There is no coincidence. Only the illusion of coincidence.
Alan Moore
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. In the society of illusion, reality must manifest itself. The story songs of Joel Rafael are that manifestation ... the essence of minstrel.
John Trudell
#63. Where do we people go if not towards the perfection of our own illusion?
Sorin Cerin
#64. Joseph moved to prove his sincerity in his vision-they moved ahead to invalidate his sincerity and what they think is his imaginative illusion.
Ikechukwu Joseph
#65. 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
#66. Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations-though the illusion that they are persists in the West.
Henry A. Kissinger
#67. All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#68. You have no fixed self. This is only an illusion that causes you to feel pain and suffering.
Frederick Lenz
#69. And that luck was only fate's cheating, giving an illusion of power. But that illusion lingered, and I became restless. I decided to act, to challenge fate. (...) I gained courage; every afternoon I walked a little farther. And one day I got there.
V.S. Naipaul
#70. Matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, and that time is a material substance.
Madeleine L'Engle
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.
Parker Palmer
#74. The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#75. 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
#76. It's overwhelming. I feel as if I am living in an illusion a dream where all things are possible. Amazing things do happen I know but always to someone else always in some far off place and time.
Christopher Paolini
#77. The secret to film is that it's an illusion.
George Lucas
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.
Saul Alinsky
#81. In that moment, I welcomed back the light and let go of the fear, the feelings of unworthiness, the past, the loss, the wallowing, the grief and the anger. I let go of the illusion of control in our losses, of our afflictions.
Ariana Carruth
#82. If people are always comfortable with you, you're probably not telling them the whole truth.
Aniekee Tochukwu Ezekiel
#83. Want something true?
- I killed god...
...
Hahaha, look your face... you started believing me... whaterver to be honest god is the world best Illusion in this world "Matrix".
Deyth Banger
#84. The fresh start is always an illusion but a necessary one.
Eleanor Clark
#85. I think the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It's actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what's killing us.
Eve Ensler
#86. Divinity is accident of nature, magic is the work of an art.
Amit Kalantri
#87. Magicians are the people who began to use film as an illusion on stage.
David Copperfield
#88. Boxing begins in illusion and ends in real blood and tears. That's what makes it so beautiful.
Brian D'Ambrosio
#89. She became an illusion of herself. It was easier to cope with people that way
Tina J. Richardson
#90. We romanticize the past with an illusion that we'd know how we'd fit.
Robin Weigert
#91. Worldly knowledge (laukik gnan) is called illusion (bhranti).
Dada Bhagwan
#92. I am against limitations like perspective. Perspective is illusion, it's the opposite of presence, and art is presence.
Pierre Soulages
#93. Nowledge which ... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate.
Ernest Gellner
#94. I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice. The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.
Bell Hooks
#95. I like plans. They create a comforting illusion of sanity and order.
Tim Pratt
#96. The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.
Horace Greeley
#97. The difference between a retiring man and a used condom is that the condom isn't given a golden watch to inspire the illusion that it still matters to whomever that has just used it.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#98. The "more" of Christianity is a myth; a deceitful illusion designed to keep you busy and running in circles, always seeking but never finding, always learning but never coming to the knowledge of the Truth - a carrot on a stick, if you will.
D.R. Silva
#99. The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity's ancient campaign against pagan nature.?
Camille Paglia
#100. Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars.
Tariq Ramadan
