Selected illusion quotes

1. Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

2. I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

3. You've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.

4. The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

5. Life is a process of losing our illusions, until we finally lose the illusion that we're alive.

6. Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

7. If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.

8. Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

9. One of man's important mistakes, one which must be remembered, is his illusion in regard to his I. Man such as we know him, the 'man-machine,' the man who cannot 'do,' and with whom and through whom everything 'happens,' cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago.

10. Another method of eating burning coals employs small balls of burned cotton in a dish of burning alcohol.

11. To cause the face to appear in a mass of flame make use of the following: mix together thoroughly petroleum, lard, mutton tallow and quick lime. Distill this over a charcoal fire, and the liquid which results can be burned on the face without harm.

12. Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

13. Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.

14. Being a star doesn't last. That's not what life should be about. It's a complete illusion that really has nothing to do with you. For me, finding out about life is the most important thing.

15. The motion of the stars over our heads is as much an illusion as that of the cows, trees and churches that flash past the windows of our train.

16. How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.

17. Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

18. A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

19. Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

20. There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

21. If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?

22. It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.

23. What I want to know is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?

24. The thing that makes you know that Vernon Ward is a good painter is if you look at his ducks, you can see the eyes follow you around the room.

25. Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

26. All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway.

27. A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

28. Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

29. I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights, so it looks like I'm the only one moving.

30. All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.

31. Both the forces of good and evil will keep the universe alive for us, until we awake from our dreams and give up this building of mud pies.

32. Work and worship are necessary to take away the veil, to lift off the bondage and illusion.

33. We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

34. 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.

35. Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.

36. The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

37. Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds.

38. What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

39. The fact that man produces a concept 'I' besides the totality of his mental and emotional experiences or perceptions does not prove that there must be any specific existence behind such a concept. We are succumbing to illusions produced by our self-created language, without reaching a better understanding of anything. Most of so-called philosophy is due to this kind of fallacy.

40. The busy chatter of the heat Shrilled like a parakeet; And shuddering at the noonday light The dust lay dead and white As powder on a mummy's face, Or fawned with simian grace Round booths with many a hard bright toy And wooden brittle joy: The cap and bells of Time the Clown That, jangling, whistled down Young cherubs hidden in the guise Of every bird that flies; And star-bright masks for youth to wear, Lest any dream that fare - Bright pilgrim - past our ken, should see Hints of Reality.

41. Nocte latent mendae, vitioque ignoscitur omni, Horaque formosam quamlibet illa facit.

42. ?Que es la vida? Un frenesi. ?Que es la vida? Una ilusion, una sombra, una ficcion, y el mayor bien es pequeno; que toda la vida es sueno, y los suenos, suenos son.

43. ?Que os espanta, si fue mi maestro un sueno, y estoy temiendo, en mis ansias, que he de despertar y hallarme otra vez en mi cerrada prision? Y cuando no sea, el sonarlo solo basta; pues asi llegue a saber que toda la dicha humana, en fin, pasa como sueno.

44. It is an amiable illusion, which the shape of our planet prompts, that every man is at the top of the world.

45. Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

46. Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of the illusions that sustained mankind in earlier times, this self-consciousness of ours does little to sustain us now. The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?

47. There's something that remains barbarous in educated people, and lately I've more and more had the feeling that we are nonwondering primitives. And why is it that we no longer marvel at these technological miracles? They've become the external facts of every life. We've all been to the university, we've had introductory courses in everything, and therefore we have persuaded ourselves that if we had the time to apply ourselves to these scientific marvels, we would understand them. But of course that's an illusion. It couldn't happen. Even among people who have had careers in science. They know no more about how it all works than we do. So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding everything. Not that we actually do understand, but that we have the capacity.

48. He had a sharp vision; no illusions lulled him to sleep except for an often exaggerated faith in his own ideas.

49. 'Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter.'

50. Here by the baring bough Raking up leaves, Often I ponder how Springtime deceives,- I, an old woman now, Raking up leaves.

51. Like Dead Sea fruits, that tempt the eye, But turn to ashes on the lips.

52. For just a minute there I was dreaming, for just a minute is was all so real. For just a minute she was standing there with me.

53. My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias come close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

54. A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

55. Ex umbris et imaginibus in vertitatem!

56. Reason, an Ignis fatuus of the Mind, Which leaves the light of Nature, Sense, behind.

57. The hills of manhood wear a noble face When seen from far; The mist of light from which they take their grace Hides what they are.

58. Utter confusion/ Live on in your illusion/ That won't wear out

59. though mankind persuades itself that every weed's a rose,roses(you feel certain) will only smile

60. ... the book about the bird and the bee is natural history. It's an awful lesson to mankind. You think that you are Ann's suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued; that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey. You need not sit looking longingly at the bait through the wires of the trap: the door is open, and will remain so until it shuts behind you for ever.

61. Truth is... one approach to the attainment of the good, but in and of itself, it is neither the good nor the beautiful... Socrates, Pascal, and others regarded knowledge of the truth with regard to purposeless objects as incongruous with the good... [by] exposing deception, truth destroys illusion, which is the principle attribute of beauty.

62. As long as no one said anything, he could pretend that it was love. That she felt about him as he felt about her

63. a masterpiece of deception

64. You know they got me trapped in this prison of seclusion/Happiness, living on tha streets is a delusion

65. You waste the attention of your eyes, the glittering labour of your hands, and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves of which you'll taste not a morsel; you are free to slave for others-- you are free to make the rich richer. The moment you're born they plant around you mills that grind lies lies to last you a lifetime. You keep thinking in your great freedom a finger on your temple free to have a free conscience. Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape, your arms long, hanging, your saunter about in your great freedom: you're free with the freedom of being unemployed. You love your country as the nearest, most precious thing to you. But one day, for example, they may endorse it over to America, and you, too, with your great freedom-- you have the freedom to become an air-base. You may proclaim that one must live not as a tool, a number or a link but as a human being-- then at once they handcuff your wrists. You are free to be arrested, imprisoned and even hanged. There's neither an iron, wooden nor a tulle curtain in your life; there's no need to choose freedom: you are free. But this kind of freedom is a sad affair under the stars.

66. You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.

67. The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

68. The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

69. Cloud cuckoo land

70. I've been loving a lie

71. The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.

72. There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

73. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.

74. 'Susan, I saw you in the classroom today, as the sun came from behind the clouds, a burst of brilliant light caught your hair, it was haloed in front of me. You turned, your eyes flashed fire into my soul, I immediately read the words of Dostoevsky and Karl Marx, and in the words of Albert Schweitzer, I fancy you!' But no, at 13 you're just going, ''Ello Sue: I've got legs. D'ya like: bread? I've got a French loaf. [mimes smacking someone with the loaf and dashing off] Byeee! [high voice] I love you!'

75. For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.

76. Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a 'truth' of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.

77. What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

78. Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

79. It is one of our perennial problems, whether there is actually a God. From the Hindu point of view each soul is divine. All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn't matter what you call Him just as long as you call. Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusion. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture. One's values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture and that not in, but beyond, lies his own ultimate reality.

80. We were talking about the space between us all and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion. Never glimpse the truth - then it's far too late when they pass away.

81. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

82. Our experience is composed rathery of illusions that of wisdom acquired.

83. How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.

84. We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.

85. Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

86. The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking.

87. 'My people have been wearing green glasses on their eyes for so long that most of them think this really is an Emerald City.'

88. The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

89. O Memory! thou fond deceiver.

90. Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

91. He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

92. Then shall it come to pass the saying that is written,' a voice said. 'Death is swallowed up. In victory.' Perhaps only Fred heard it. 'Because,' the voice said, 'as soon as the writing appears backward, then you know which is illusion and which is not. The confusion ends, and death, the last enemy, Substance Death, is swallowed not into the body but up - in victory. Behold, I tell you the sacred secret now: we shall not all sleep in death.

93. There are girls who do not like real life... Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love - a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable.

94. Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.

95. Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.

96. So sweet love seemed that April morn, When first we kissed beside the thorn, So strangely sweet, it was not strange We thought that love could never change.

97. What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

98. Why is the illusion of life so 'fake'?

99. The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say, 'Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid ever, because - this is just a ride.' And we : kill those people. 'Shut him up. We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. Jesus, murdered; Martin Luther King, murdered; Malcolm X, murdered; Gandhi, murdered; John Lennon, murdered; Reagan : wounded. But it doesn't matter, because - it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

100. Drawing is deception.