Illusion Quotes

1. "Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion."
Author: Allan Bloom

2. "Why is that I never get cut off from pity, sympathy, participation, in spite of the fact that I am living out of my own dream, my interior vision, my fantasies without any interruptions. I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, have nightmares, write in my head, compose, decompose, improvise, invent, I listen to all, I hear all that is said, I feel Spain, I am aware, I am everywhere , I am open to wounds, open to love, I am rooted to my devotions, I am never separete, I am never cut off, never blind, deaf, absent. I hold on to the dream which makes life possible, to the creation which transfigures, to the God who sustains, to the crimes which gave life, to the illusions which makes the marvelous possible. I hold on to the poetry and the human simplicities."
Author: Anaïs Nin

3. "But he recognized that the illusions of the child only differed from those of the man in that they were more picturesque; belief in fairies and belief in the Stock Exchange as bestowers of happiness were equally vain, but the latter form of faith was ugly as well as inept."
Author: Arthur Machen

4. "And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold. You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken or potbellied. Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you. But you are not just that. You are accepted.' Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted."
Author: Brennan Manning

5. "My mind id more problem/solution orientated. Mad at me? Scream at me. Punch me if you're up for it. Please don't smile at me sweetly, act like nothing is wrong and then leave me disillusioned. - Caleb"
Author: C.J. Roberts

6. "Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone."
Author: Carl Sagan

7. "The Art Magicke has rules. It means I have to teach you all my tricks. All the substitutions, the replications, the illusions. How to read minds and palms and leaves. How to disappear and reappear."How to saw people in half?""That too.""Nice."
Author: Catherine Fisher

8. "The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion."
Author: Craig Bruce

9. "The way you're singing in your sleepThe way you look before you leapThe strange illusions that you keepYou don't knowBut I'm noticingThe way your touch turns into arcsThe way you slide into the darkThe beating of my open heartYou don't knowBut I'm noticing"
Author: David Levithan

10. "We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark."
Author: Elie Wiesel

11. "..he continues to cling to the forlorn hope that I will turn into one of those swooning females...and fling myself squeeling at him whenever anything happens. Like all men, he clings to his illusions."
Author: Elizabeth Peters

12. "Life in illusion is in a transient belief on insight without perspective"
Author: Farley Maglaya

13. "Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions – the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

14. "Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion."
Author: Friedrich Hayek

15. "Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything."
Author: Gertrude Stein

16. "We labor under so many illusions about ourselves until we're stripped bare. Being infected, being a vampire, it's always you. Maybe it's more you than ever before. You, distilled. You, boiled down like a sauce. But it's you as you always were, deep down inside."
Author: Holly Black

17. "Obi-Wan Kenobi once said ‘your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them.' It seems to be getting harder. Distinguishing reality from the illusions people make for us, or the ones we make for ourselves. I don't know, maybe that's part of the plan, to make me think I'm crazy…it's working."
Author: Huey Freeman

18. "When life attains a crisis, man's focus narrows. […] The world becomes a stage of immediate concern, swept free of illusion."
Author: Jim Thompson

19. "Many ask what difference does it make whether man believes in a God or not.It makes a big difference.It makes all the difference in the world.It is the difference between being right and being wrong; it is the difference between truth and surmises—facts or delusion.It is the difference between the earth being flat, and the earth being round.It is the difference between the earth being the center of the universe, or a tiny speck in this vast and uncharted sea of multitudinous suns and galaxies.It is the difference in the proper concept of life, or conclusions based upon illusion.It is the difference between verified knowledge and the faith of religion.It is a question of Progress or the Dark Ages."
Author: Joseph Lewis

20. "He didn't maintain my illusion of myself, he gave me an illusion of myself. Before I met him, I never thought of myself as an actress. Boy, he sidetracked me in a great way!"
Author: Judy Holliday

21. "Being a famous actress may give you a sense of being important, but believe me, it's just an illusion."
Author: Juliette Binoche

22. "I know about your happy little illusion, that you never call your wife by name, that you take amphetamines just to give yourself that kick in the ass that reminds you that you're not a machine, that you have the constant need to be on top because you're so far down the evolutionary ladder that a f***ing amoeba uses you as a footstool."
Author: Ken Alexopoulos

23. "Never in our silent moments of illusion do we sense the dark parallel that lives next to us. Nor do we suspect the carrier."
Author: Kris Courtney

24. "The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

25. "After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey's request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window, talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrey ceased speaking, and felt suddenly a lump in his throat from tears, the possibility of which he had never dreamed of in himself. He looked at Natasha singing, and something new and blissful stirred in his soul. He was happy, and at the same time he was sad. He certainly had nothing to weep about, but he was ready to weep. For what? For his past love? For the little princess? For his lost illusions? For his hopes for the future? Yes, and no. The chief thing which made him ready to weep was a sudden, vivid sense of the fearful contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable existing in him, and something limited and material, which he himself was, and even she was. This contrast made his heart ache, and rejoiced him while she was singing."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

26. "There is indeed a great deal of futility amongst the human race which we do not commonly see, for it all forms part of our illusion; but let a man be much annoyed by something that others do, so that he is separated from them and has to leave them, and looks back at what they are doing, and he'll see at once all manner of whimsical absurdities that he had not noticed before; and Ramon Alonzo in the shade of his oak, waiting for the noon to go by, grew very contemptuous of the attitude that the world took up towards shadows."
Author: Lord Dunsany

27. "Our culture believes strong individuals can transcend their circumstances. I myself don't much enjoy books by Hardy or Dreiser or Wharton, where the outside world is so strong, so overwhelming, that the individual hasn't a chance. I get impatient, I keep feeling that somehow the deck is stacked unfairly. That is the point, of course, but my feeling is that if that's true, I don't want to play. I prefer to move to another table where I can retain my illusion, if illusion it be, that I'm working only against only probabilities, and have a chance to win. Then if you lose, you can blame it on your own poor playing. That is called a tragic flaw, and like guilt, it's very comforting. You can go on believing that there really is a right way, and you just didn't find it."
Author: Marilyn French

28. "God's revelation... unmasks our illusions about ourselves. It exposes our pride, our individualism, our self-centeredness - in short, our sin. But worship also offers forgiveness, healing, transformation, motivation, and courage to work in the world for God's justice and peace - in short, salvation in its largest sense."
Author: Marva J. Dawn

29. "Dreams aren't only an illusion to put you into a subconsciously pleasurable state of mind for the time being, but also a pathway to gain complete contentment."
Author: Mehek Bassi

30. "The nostalgia of a moment's love can be an illusionary precipice from which we fall from truth; in heartbreak, what we escape to in the past is what tortures us in the present."
Author: Mike Norton

31. "Jan had friends who like him had left their old homeland and who devoted all their time to the struggle for its lost freedom. All of them had sometimes felt that the bond tying them to their country was just an illusion and that only enduring habit kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about. They all knew that feeling and at the same time were afraid of knowing it; they turned their heads away from fear of seeing the border and stumbling (lured by vertigo as by an abyss) across it to the other side, where the language of their tortured people make a noise as trivial as the twittering of birds."
Author: Milan Kundera

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."
Author: Nadine Gordimer

33. "Oh dear... it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?"
Author: Nancy Mitford

34. "The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature."
Author: Neal Stephenson

35. "If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion."
Author: Noam Chomsky

36. "The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action."
Author: Oscar Wilde

37. "What is illusion?M.: To whom is the illusion? Find it out. Then illusion will vanish.Generally people want to know about illusion and do not examineto whom it is. It is foolish. Illusion is outside and unknown. Butthe seeker is considered to be known and is inside. Find out whatis immediate, intimate, instead of trying to find out what is distantand unknown."
Author: Ramana Maharshi

38. "Clinton impressed Assad: a young man who appeared to want to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli dispute - an illusion of course, but that's what Assad thought."
Author: Robert Fisk

39. "The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
Author: Robert Wilson Lynd

40. "Our moral reasoning is plagued by two illusions. The first illusion can be called the wag-the-dog illusion: We believe that our own moral judgment (the dog) is driven by our own moral reasoning (the tail). The second illusion can be called the wag-theother-dog's-tail illusion: In a moral argument, we expect the successful rebuttal of an opponent's arguments to change the opponent's mind. Such a belief is like thinking that forcing a dog's tail to wag by moving it with your hand will make the dog happy."
Author: Sam Harris

41. "Tanto è il potere che ha sulla mia carne un'illusione, un'immagine della mia mente, che quando dormo delle false visioni acquistano su di me una forza di suggestione quale da sveglio non hanno neppure quelle vere."
Author: Sant'Agostino

42. "Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."
Author: Sigmund Freud

43. "Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events."
Author: Steve Martin

44. "Christ has redeemed our humanity from vanity and our time from illusion."
Author: T.F. Torrance

45. "You have no idea," he says to me, "what it means to truly suffer. Sometimes I think you live in some fantasy land where everyone survives on optimism-- but it doesn't work that way out here. In this world, you're either alive, about to die, or dead. There's no romance in it. No illusion. So don't try to pretend you have any idea what it means to be alive today. Right now. Because you don't."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

46. "We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day..."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

47. "He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still the sky was blue."
Author: Wallace Stevens

48. "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."
Author: Woody Allen

49. "Feeling at home anywhere on earth, and a foreigner even in the country where I was born, I consider myself an earthling, a citizen of the world.I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity. I have lived through tremendous adventures and survived only because other people risked their lives for me. Realising how interconnected and interdependent we all are, I am neither shy or embarrassed when it is time for me lean on another to ask for help. And when I have the opportunity to help another, I view it as my duty and privilege."
Author: Yossi Ghinsberg

50. "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."
Author: Yukio Mishima

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