Top 49 The Great Illusion Quotes
#1. Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.
Yukio Mishima
#2. The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#3. That's the great illusion of travel, of course, the notion that there's somewhere to get to. A place where you can finally say, Ah, I've arrived. (Of course there is no such place. There's only a succession of waitings until you go home.)
David Gilmour
#4. One travels to escape from it all, but that is the great illusion: It cannot be done, since one travels with one's mind.
Ella Maillart
#5. The genius of a great magician is as impressive as the genius of a great scientist.
Amit Kalantri
#6. The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany ... One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.
Mircea Eliade
#7. Control never lasted. Eventually the illusion of time, the pull of gravity, and catastrophic events reminded everyone of their mortality and their utter insignificance in the great big world. Life was nothing more than one lone blink. Here today. Gone tomorrow.
Jewel E. Ann
#8. When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you ... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.
Ernest Hemingway,
#9. And believing that we are broken is the same as being broken. It means we experience ourselves that way. That perception shapes our reality. It is an illusion we must strive to avoid, as great misery comes from such a belief.
Jewel
#10. The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
Charles Horton Cooley
#11. Once you empower people and say,' Here you are, now you get to dream the great dream of becoming a full citizen with equal rights and radical improvement in your living situation,' you are creating an illusion which will break one day.
Pankaj Mishra
#12. One of the great illusions of our time is that hurrying will buy us more time.
John Ortberg
#13. The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno .
Italo Svevo
#14. 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
#15. If a fox is unable to befriend a tiger, then the fox should create an illusion of close association with the tiger by carefully trailing behind the cat while boasting of the deep friendship they share. In this way, he creates an impression that his well being is of great concern to the tiger.
Chin-Ning Chu
#16. The great human problem of evil stems from the illusion of separateness. Whenever this illusion is overcome, we behave lovingly to one another.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#17. To me, the art of cinema is the same as the art of painting. The artist takes a 2D medium and gives you the illusion of depth. If you look at any of the great paintings, you have the illusion of depth. Which is part of the art. The same with the great movies.
William Friedkin
#18. Perhaps the greatest illusion a writer ever creates is that his work is achieved without great effort or sacrifice.
David Alejandro Fearnhead
#19. Another great illusion that woman must ... destroy .. is the impurity of sex, the realisation in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex - except in the mental attitude toward it ...
Mina Loy
#21. I will tell you something that you don't want to hear: Autumn is ugly! Look at the dying leaves! There is no beauty in dying! Death is always ugly! The beauty of autumn is just an illusion, my friend! Wake up and see the real truth! See the crying leaves!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#22. Watergate is the great liberal illusion that you can have public virtue without private morality.
Clare Boothe Luce
#23. Sometimes for the spectators a great magic effect is worth a life's experience.
Amit Kalantri
#24. Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.
Andre Maurois
#25. No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind, such as cars that won't start.
Larry McMurtry
#26. The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor.
H.P. Lovecraft
#27. Blessed is he who believes in the illusion because thus he can find his great truth!
Sorin Cerin
#28. 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
#29. A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where virute is concerned, Experience is the mother of illusion.
C.S. Lewis
#30. 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
#31. The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
Lionel Shriver
#32. With an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion.
Nadine Gordimer
#33. A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
#34. The Grand Illusion, one of the great war films of all time.
Studs Terkel
#35. A great magician is as divine as God and his stage is as majestic as the paradise.
Amit Kalantri
#36. The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites.
Gaston Bachelard
#37. Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
Francoise Sagan
#38. There are some great actors I don't want to meet because I don't want to know how they did it. I don't want to know anything about their personal life, and the illusion, or whatever it is, the shape-shiftery magic stuff that they do, which is my joy.
Rupert Friend
#39. A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web "God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father," but it can be known only as love.
Joan Z. Borysenko
#40. Until we have a firm understanding of the flow of time, or incontrovertible evidence that it is indeed an illusion, then we will not know who we are, or what part we are playing in the great cosmic drama." - Paul Davies, professor of theoretical physics and cosmology
Nina Nenova
#41. The great difficulty with communication is the illusion it has been accomplished.
George Bernard Shaw
#42. We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.
Walter Brueggemann
#43. Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
George Eliot
#44. You may be living under the illusion that when God ignites great things in your life, He'll announce it with a big bang. He might. It's more likely that He won't. So stop waiting around for the big bang. Pay attention to the subtle clues and the still, small voice. God lives in that place too.
Steven Furtick
#45. I don't put a girl in a box and clap my hands three times, and she's gone. I get in the box, and I vanish, and I reappear at the other side of the stage. That way, people don't think, 'That's a great illusion.' They think, 'Doug's a great magician.'
Doug Henning
#46. Alexander the Great once said that 'I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity!' What a great illusion is this! Wise man is he who always chooses to live longer and he who blesses the obscurity!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#47. For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery.
Louise Erdrich
#48. The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.
Harold Bloom
#49. As the Battle of Normandy raged, the Germans held fast to the illusion, so carefully planted and now so meticulously sustained, that a great American army under Patton was preparing to pounce and the German forces in the Pas de Calais must remain in place to repel it.
Ben Macintyre
