Top 100 What Is Illusion Quotes
#1. Samantha reminds me of the difference between what is illusion and what is real. I am reminded whenever I forget that we choose our truth and whether to embrace it or not.
H. Raven Rose
#2. The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.
Philip Guston
#3. Love is an illusion. It's nothing but a mirage. It doesn't matter how he looks on the outside, or who he is on the inside. Right now, you're convinced that you love your darling, but... try thinking about it logically.
Tomoko Hayakawa
#4. What an utter disgrace it would be to find something truly magic and spend any time at all pretending and trying to convince yourself it is all just an unbelievably orchestrated and beautifully choreographed illusion.
Tyler Knott Gregson
#5. Pain destroys the illusions of false, that is, elitist pleasures. It burns from the inside out. It, therefore, sensitizes us to what is truly beautiful in life.
Matthew Fox
#6. Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.
James Broughton
#7. If you look at the evolution of the brain, the logic centers, they were growing at the same time as the creative centers were expanding. And that creates this really potent illusion that you're not just a bag of chemicals reacting to shit. Which is what you are.
Tim Cannon
#8. There is no truth beyond illusion ... between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where reality comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and magic.
Donna Tartt
#9. I think illusion is one of the most interesting things that I've found to think about. Just look at yesterday, and what you were doing, and how important it was, and how nonexistent it is now! How dreamlike it is! Same thing with tomorrow. So where are we living?
Laurie Anderson
#10. What you think you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach.
Ayn Rand
#11. What is evil? Killing is evil, lying is evil, slandering is evil, abuse is evil, gossip is evil, envy is evil, hatred is evil, to cling to false doctrine is evil; all these things are evil. And what is the root of evil? Desire is the root of evil, illusion is the root of evil.
Gautama Buddha
#12. A push-up bra is to a woman's chest ... what 'breathing-in' is to a man's stomach.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#13. When you empty yourself of the illusions of who and what you think you are, there is less to lose than you had feared.
Carol Orsborn
#14. What an illusion Mahamaya has conjured up! Here is this infinite world, and what one claims as his possession will be left behind at death. Still men cannot understand this simple truth.
Sarada Devi
#15. Who knows what true happiness is, not the conventional word.. but the naked terror. To the lonely themselves, that wears a mask, the most miserable outcast hugs some memory.. or some illusion.
Joseph Conrad
#16. 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
#17. What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
Woody Allen
#18. Men have the illusion of having a duty to make the world spin properly, which is precisely what makes it wobble.
Vernon Howard
#19. What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.
Sigmund Freud
#20. The poor fool hadn't realized that if all mankind shares a folly or an illusion, and likes to share it even knowing what it is, then the illusion is much more valuable and fine a kind of thing than the ass who wants to upset it.
John Dickson Carr
#21. 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
#22. And what would happen to my illusion that I am a force for order in the home if I wasn't married to the only man north of the Tiber who is even untidier than I am?
Katharine Whitehorn
#23. Happiness is an illusion, Natalie. It doesn't actually exist."
"Of course it does," I said. "It's what you feel when you're not sad."
"That's unconsciousness. And I'm pretty sure that I'm miserable when I am unconscious, too.
Lee Goldberg
#24. So much of this world is based on illusion, temporaries, and disposability that I think it's essential that our closest relationships reflect what is real.
Gillian Anderson
#25. We're in an illusion about what our role is in world politics and foreign affairs, and our policies are killing and destroying and doing a lot of things that we are not aware of.
Talib Kweli
#26. Is love the ultimate illusion? Or is it what it seems to be
the greatest transformation of all? (Glyrenden)
Sharon Shinn
#27. Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#28. To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
Eugene O'Neill
#29. What is a movie star? It is an illusion. It was everything I ever wanted to be, but it became a kind of shell, non? It was what made me famous and got me women. But it wasn't real.
Jean-Claude Van Damme
#30. I blame my generation for having neglected to teach our children that in life there are no safe places, that safety is an illusion. "Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark," Baldwin said in an interview in 1961.
Azar Nafisi
#31. Even a scientist is a human being, and it is quite natural that he, like others, hates the things he cannot explain and thus falls victim to the common illusion that what we know today represents the highest summit of knowledge.
C. G. Jung
#32. Do not be misled by what you see around you, or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideals. But you are not part of that world.
Sai Baba
#33. Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#34. Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
Theodor Adorno
#35. What is sometimes thought to be clever is, significantly often, merely an advanced form of foolishness.
Idries Shah
#36. What's important to me is that [photographs] have the appearance of being documents of what goes on. I like the illusion of veracity, that they look like life rather than movie stills. I don't want them to look fabricated.
Larry Sultan
#37. The sun never sets. It is only an appearance due to the observer's limited perspective. And yet, what a sublime illusion it is.
Eckhart Tolle
#38. Death is nothing, nor life either, for that matter. To die, to sleep, to pass into nothingness, what does it matter? Everything is an illusion.
Mata Hari
#39. What is actually happening is often less important than what appears to be happening.
William V. Shannon
#40. The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit, fumed-oak drill hall serving as a temporary soap box for political propaganda.
Noel Coward
#41. Jesus came to announce to us that an identity based on success, popularity and power is a false identity- an illusion! Loudly and clearly he says: 'You are not what the world makes you; but you are children of God.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#42. Beware! Success is not what you think it is. It's a trap.
Bryant McGill
#43. I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic's best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he's doing is easy is an occupational hazard.
Richard Russo
#44. My life is exactly what it's meant to be, and I'm okay. I'm. Okay. Those two words, yeah, they mean a lot to me. I'm not perfect, I'm not completely healed, but I'm okay. I'll take it.
Ashley Beale
#45. People have put a lot of faith in the government's ability to get growth going in China. People have this, what I think, illusion that there are six people in China who really have their hand on every button. And what we're learning is, it's a very big economy and they're not that good at it.
David Wessel
#47. The past is an illusion. You must learn to live in the present and accept yourself for what you are now. What you lack in flexibility and agility you must make up with knowledge and constant practice.
Bruce Lee
#48. I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.
George Sand
#49. Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.
Susan Sontag
#50. What is society but an individual? [ ... ] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.
Osamu Dazai
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. What we touch with our fingers is false. What we feel through our perceptions is real. What we see through our eyes is an illusion, but what we see through our heart is real.
Debasish Mridha
#54. Not all magic is fireworks and fanfare. Sometimes magic is quiet and sneaks up on you. An illusion is what needs all the bells and whistles to make itself appear grander than it really is, which is just a trick that can be explained.
Jeff Guinn
#55. There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#56. What is called family pride is often founded on the illusion of self-love. A man wishes to perpetuate and immortalize himself.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#57. Maybe that's what love is, in the end: a shared illusion of safety.
Amanda Eyre Ward
#58. I've never been under the illusion that everybody on death row is innocent - far from it. My own guess is upwards of 90 percent are guilty. But a ten percent error rate if that's what it is, or even five percent, is really way too high.
Scott Turow
#59. The art of a magician is not found in the simple deception, but in what surrounds it, the construction of a reality which supports the illusion.
Jim Steinmeyer
#60. What a costume designer does is a cross between magic and camouflage. We create the illusion of changing the actors into what they are not. We ask the public to believe that every time they see a performer on the screen, he's become a different person.
Edith Head
#61. To lose awareness of what is helpful or harmful in the worldly life is moh (Illusory vision & attachment).
Dada Bhagwan
#62. Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.
Charles Addams
#63. In a city of illusion, where change is what the city does, it's no wonder Las Vegas is the court of last resort, the last place to start over, to reinvent yourself in the same way that the city does, time after time. For some it works; for some it doesn't, but they keep coming and trying.
Hal Rothman
#64. What is fear?" she breathed. 'Fear is nothing. Fear is illusion. Pass through its fire. Truth lies at its core. What it Truth?" She stood up, feeling calmer and glared up at the sinking sun. "I am Truth," she whispered fiercely.
J.D. Lakey
#65. There outside there is a lot of stuff which you learn, the clock illusion, that you live in the past, that you can survive without a brain but not for long period...What Is Consciousness? And many other stuff... (so the question which has left, do you have the time to do it?)
Deyth Banger
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. What you wish for, what you most hope for - that is your greatest illusion.
Christopher Pike
#78. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable ... The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
John Steinbeck
#79. What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.
Ludwig Von Mises
#80. Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call "reality". However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?
Masashi Kishimoto
#81. I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusion about freedom plague them both.
Yann Martel
#82. And what did it mean that this choice was an illusion, that all choices are illusions, or that if they are not illusions, their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choice of all the other men and women deciding in that moment?
Kevin Powers
#83. From experience, I came to learn that ayahuasca bestows upon the user knowledge about a variety of topics, not only consciousness and perception, but also leads one to realize that what we perceive is an illusion.
Pablo Amaringo
#84. Getting older is a question of coming to terms with the fact that you'll never know the secrets; and the resulting equilibrium is what gives the illusion of actually knowing them.
Paul Shepheard
#85. We are just waves in time and space, changing continuously, and the illusion of individuality is produced through the concatenation of the rapidly succeeding phases of existence. What we define as likeness is merely the result of the symmetrical arrangement of molecules which compose our body.
Nikola Tesla
#86. What of Art?
-It is a malady.
Love?
-An Illusion.
Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
What are you?
-To define is to limit.
Oscar Wilde
#87. It's easy to operate under the illusion that what we are doing is so important we cannot stop doing it ... Stopping is a spiritual act. It is the refuge where we drink life in.
Sue Monk Kidd
#88. The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
Italo Calvino
#89. You know what an illusion is? On this planet, one small cloud has the ability to block the entire sun.
J.R. Rim
#90. There are limits to how much sound a cello can make. That's part of the framing of acoustical instruments. Finding what those limits might be, and then trying to suggest perhaps even the illusion of going beyond is part of that kind of effort.
Yo-Yo Ma
#91. Consciousness-raising is at the very least supposed to bring about an intimacy, but what it seems instead to bring about are the trappings of intimacy, the illusion of intimacy, a semblance of intimacy.
Nora Ephron
#92. What has been given is a new perspective on living life, and what has been taken away is the illusion of limitless life and the belief in a personal specialness exempting us from natural law.
Irvin D. Yalom
#93. What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy
#94. 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
#95. Believing in what you don't know is as true as believing in what you know as long as your life is just an illusion.
Sorin Cerin
#97. War." Gorgon spits the word. "That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus and shall always be so.
Libba Bray
#98. There is no more self-contradictory concept than that of idle thoughts. What gives rise to the perception of a whole world can hardly be called idle. Every thought we have either contributes to truth or to illusion.
Gautama Buddha
#99. We're hallucinating. And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.
Marianne Williamson
#100. Cheap medical care is one of the most expensive things there is. So long as politicians can create the illusion of something for nothing, that gets them votes, which is what it is all about, as far as they are concerned.
Thomas Sowell
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