Top 100 Quotes About Illusions
#1. Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.
Hector Berlioz
#3. I have had four happy days in my life, and three of them turned out to be illusions.
Taylor Caldwell
#4. What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.
Ruth Bernhard
#5. Those who are unhappy
clutch at shadows, and to
give themselves an enjoyment
that truth refuses them, they
artfully bring into being all
sorts of illusions.
Marquis De Sade
#6. The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.
Abraham Maslow
#7. We'd had to find each other to finally understand that love could not be controlled. Predictions, assumptions, and absolutes were illusions. My love for him was volatile, uncontrollable, and overpowering, but ... that was love. Love was real.
Jamie McGuire
#8. What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand.
Eugene Delacroix
#9. Safety and constancy were illusions granted only to those afraid enough not to peer beyond the walls.
James Rozoff
#11. Those who unconsciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not necessarily wise. But those who have not given up hope can succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all illusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties.
Erich Fromm
#12. What mortal is there, over whose first joys and happiness does not break some storm, dispelling with its icy breath his fanciful illusions, and shattering his altar?
Alphonse De Lamartine
#13. I never look at other people's work. My mind has to be completely focused on my own illusions.
Alexander McQueen
#14. The biggest trap in life consists in achieving illusions after years of hard work and realize that there's nothing there but an empty you.
Robin Sacredfire
#15. With me, illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you - that's my way of functioning and working. I will sabotage you from your very roots! Unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you.
Osho
#16. Let the disappointments pass
Let the laughter fill your glass
Let the illusions last until they shatter
Whatever you might hope to find
among the thoughts that crowd your mind
There won't be many that ever really matter.
Jackson Browne
#17. All spiritual practices are illusions created by illusionists to escape illusion.
Ram Dass
#18. As adults we get so entrapped in illusions and trivia, that we forget the true essence of life; and so often we need to connect with children, to understand that it is the little, priceless joys that make life beautiful and worthy.
Manprit Kaur
#19. The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.
Gaston Bachelard
#20. Success, fame, and fortune, they're all illusions. All there is that is real is the friendship that two can share.
Michael James Jackson
#21. He had no illusions about surviving the battle, or any real conscious thought about the battle at all. Logic and rational thought had been shed like a killer's false smile, and all that remained was death.
Cedric Nye
#22. The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.
Lord Acton
#23. This is where the disillusioned gathered to look for new illusions
William McKeen
#24. Most fears are just illusions.
Gary Null
#25. 'The Mahabharata,' which inspired my novel 'Palace of Illusions,' also has many stories embedded within the main tale.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#27. Among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solutions to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized expertise ... The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application.
Voltaire
#28. It's amazing, really, how in one instant a wall can be torn down, or climbed over. Misconceptions can be shattered, illusions dashed, dreams irrevocably ruined. Given the right frame of mind, within a heartbeat, people can begin the business of starting over.
Tamara Thiel
#29. Are you looking for something real in this world of illusions? Call me. Casual Flings need not apply. I am looking for Love.
Aprilynne Pike
#30. When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more.
Sam Keen
#31. It is the habit of the unthinking to turn to the illusions of economic magic. These unhappy times call for the building of plans that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#32. The 1990's will be a determining period of time for another cycle. If humanity during this time chooses to throw away a lot of the mirages and illusions it's fooled itself with, we will enter a very bright and golden age. It won't happen in one day.
Frederick Lenz
#33. Scientific objectivity is one of our most deeply held, and crippling, illusions.
Mark Frost
#34. If this war has taught us anything, it is that convictions of righteous certitude can be soul-corrupting illusions that offer mo dispensation from hell.
C.S. Harris
#35. The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.
Thomas Merton
#36. I was under no illusions as to my physical attractiveness. It was not such that it would inspire propriety-overwhelming enthusiasm.
Ann Leckie
#37. Because our generation has waited so long to have babies, we feel we've 'discovered' something that women have been doing for thousands of years. I have no illusions that I will be in the same situation as the average working mother. I'm not trying to prove anything - I just want to have kids.
Jane Pauley
#38. Things aren't always as they appear. I've been believing things to be a certain way because I want them to be that way. I build up illusions in my head.
Brett Dennen
#39. Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.
Fernando Pessoa
#40. I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be.
Jeanette Winterson
#41. No place for illusions here. The beat doesn't stop solitude, it doesn't cure pain, you can't telephone it - it's simply a reminder that you belong to a shared story.
John Berger
#42. We live our lives for our life's sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we're dead.
PZ Myers
#43. People who do affirmations will have the sensation that
they are causing the environment to conform to their will.
This is an immensely enjoyable feeling because the illusion
of control is one of the best illusions you can have.
Scott Adams
#44. I have no illusions about having another 'Seinfeld' in my life.
Jason Alexander
#45. Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is Thou shalt not question.
Sigmund Freud
#46. If you're brave enough to follow truth it will shatter you and your illusions at the same time.
Bryant McGill
#47. While we can certainly be mistaken at times about what is real, there is indeed a reality to know. Mistakes actually prove the point. We would not know there were such things as hallucinations or illusions if we did not have reality with which to compare them.
Douglas Beaumont
#49. We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
William Golding
#50. Illusions are dangerous . . . Ideas are infallible, people are not. Don't confuse the two.
Kate Moretti
#51. To try and fit reincarnation into a neat mental package is very unwise. You will be very surprised when you discover that it doesn't work out that way. Your illusions will be painful for you.
Frederick Lenz
#52. They filled us full of false illusions and promiscuity, and they led us down that class-less road of mediocrity.
Ray Davies
#53. Ah! poetry makes life what light and music do the stage - strip the one of the false embellishments, and the other of its illusions, and what is there real in either to live or care for?
Charles Dickens
#54. If a book remained roadblocked long enough, it began to decay, to fall apart; all the little tricks and illusions started to show. He
Stephen King
#55. Your ability to comprehend your environment is very strongly defined by your belief in a number of illusions. Time. Truth. Love.
Jim Butcher
#56. Now that you've reached everything, you must slay this illusion without slaying it - without becoming caught up in the illusion of slaying illusions.
Frederick Lenz
#57. illusions, so many masks and facades. All the world's a stage, as they say, and I seem to have the only seat in the house with a view behind the curtain.
William Ritter
#58. Run away. Whatever you are, run away. Run back to your gibbet, run back to your grave, little wish hound. All you can do is depress us, fill the world with shadows and illusions. The age when you ran with the wild hunt, or hunted terrified humans, it's over.
Neil Gaiman
#59. Dreams are illusions, and we can't let go of them because we would be dead.
David Copperfield
#60. The truth of who we are dissolves the illusions when they arise, simply by us not buying into them anymore. By realizing they were counterfeit bliss. By and by, oneness dissolves what was once separation.
Tehya Sky
#61. That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.
Eugene H. Peterson
#62. Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
Barbara Kingsolver
#63. In my youth I, too, entertained some illusions; but I soon recovered from them.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#64. The only really wicked men i have ever known were those who started as idealists. that is what depravity feeds on. illusions and idealism and love gone wrong.
Prosper Merimee
#65. Without execution, ideas are simply illusions.
Ben Tolosa
#66. wouldn't a loving gather, I reasoned, have more compassion than to seek revenge on His comparatively feeble children who are temporarily blinded by the illusions of time and space?
Mike Dooley
#67. Illusions can be very convincing. No one has any reason to suspect that I am anything less than what I appear.
Maggi Myers
#68. That is the essence and mission of 'rebel buddha': to free us from the illusions we create by ourselves, about ourselves, and from those that masquerade as reality in our cultural and religious institutions.
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche
#69. America is a nation of illusions; illusions in the media, schools and government - an iron curtain of propaganda.
Bryant McGill
#70. 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.
George Santayana
#71. I don't have any illusions that what we are doing is sticking the the bottle. I don't think that's what we are doing. We are trying to make sure that the genie has friends, has food to eat, a way to grow.
Hilary Rosen
#72. Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#73. Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.
Sigmund Freud
#74. The best things aren't perfectly constructed. They aren't illusions. they aren't larger than life. They are life.
Nina LaCour
#75. The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#76. Immortality, power, dominance, all are illusions. Don't you see? We are simply pawns in a game beyond our understanding.' Pug
Raymond E. Feist
#77. I go forward slowly, dead, and my vision is no longer mine, it's nothing: it's only the vision of the human animal who, without wanting, inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality, and all the other illusions that constitute the civilization in which I feel.
Where can the living be?
Fernando Pessoa
#78. My work is not great, but it's respectable. I have no false illusions.
Maurice Sendak
#79. You can't live without illusions, even if you must fight for them.
Marlene Dietrich
#80. There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.
Bill Conti
#81. What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?
W. Somerset Maugham
#82. Life never ceases. Life is an overflowing source, and death is only an obscure effect of illusions.
Andre Luiz Moreira
#83. The only real tyrants that humanity has known have always been the memories of its dead or the illusions it has forged itself.
Gustave Le Bon
#84. In Lullabies, I wanted to capture what I remembered of the drunken babbling of unfortunate twelve-year-olds: their illusions, their ludicrously bad choices, their lack of morality and utter disbelief in cause and effect
Heather O'Neill
#85. Maybe, the lesson we can all learn from the inner sadness of a Narcissist is to see through our own fabrications, our own illusions so that we can be set free to be real once more.
Shannon L. Alder
#86. The best illusions aren't a matter of technology, but of performance. First, you open the minds of the audience. Then you fill them with exactly what you want them to know.
Dan Koboldt
#87. Men are not created to know, men are not created to understand ... and our illusions increase with our knowledge.
Anatole France
#88. Dreams or illusions, call them what you will, they lift us from the commonplace of life to better things.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#89. Self-interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see truly is extraordinarily small.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#90. They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)
Elie Wiesel
#91. Human beings have illusions. The enlightened don't have illusions. They see things as they are, and in that seeing, they see ecstasy and joy. They see the play of life.
Frederick Lenz
#92. I've never had any illusions about being a lead actor in films, because lead actors have to be of a certain kind. Apart from the beauty of looks and figure, which I cannot claim to have, there's just a particular kind of ordinary-Joe quality that a film star needs to have.
Stephen Fry
#93. 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.
Anthony De Mello
#94. 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.
Arthur Helps
#95. There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularily life with other people, possible.
Nicole Krauss
#96. I do not deny the rights of democracy, but I have no illusions as to the uses that will be made of those rights so long as wisdom is rare and pride abundant
Henri Frederic Amiel
#97. What was it? Why won't you tell me?"
"I don't want to break down your illusions."
"My dear man, I have no illusions about you."
"I mean illusions about yourself.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#98. Human beings invent myth, ideology, and religion as means of denying reality and replacing death with palliative fantasies. Helplessness and death are blows to human narcissism. Human beings create illusions about themselves, lie to themselves as a means to feel secure and less vulnerable.
Jerry Piven
#99. In order to put meaning back into our lives, we should recognize illusions for what they are, and we should reach out and touch the fabric of reality.
Walker Evans
#100. Illusions are like umbrellas - you no sooner get them than you lose them, and the loss always leaves a little painful wound.
W. Somerset Maugham
