Illusion Quotes

This world's existence is one night long. There's a great lively gathering that night, but some people sleep through it.

Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.

What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's shadow.

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.

Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning - I am surely far different from what you suppose; Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade—this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?

Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit.... They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

Politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't.

The water in the stream may have changed many times, but the reflection of the moon and the stars remains the same.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

Some there be that shadows kiss; Such have but a shadow's bliss.

What? A great man? I only ever see the ape of his own ideal.

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.… You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

It is not true that the heart wears out - but the body creates this illusion.

Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do - it's always now. It's all there is. And if you continuously miss the now - resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a means to an end, then you miss the essence of your life, and you are stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations, judgments - the conditioned content of your mind that you take to be yourself.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

It is no use dealing with illusions and make-believes. We must look at the facts. The world ... is too dangerous for anyone to be able to afford to nurse illusions. We must look at realities.

Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane

I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.

truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal.

My philosophy is inverted Platonism: the further a thing is from true being, the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Living inillusion as a goal!

Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.

Alas, how right the ancient saying is: We, who are old, are nothing else but noise And shape. Like mimicries of dreams we go, And have no wits, although we think us wise.

The capacity of any conqueror is more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time

Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together." Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me. Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?

I don't vote. We're led to believe we're free through the exercise of ineffective freedoms.

Life is the art of being well deceived, and to succeed, it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

You think the shadow is the substance.

Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

Carrying The Beatles' or the Sixties' dream around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That's not to say you can't enjoy Glenn Miller or The Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone. It's not living now. It's an illusion.

Fears are nothing more than a state of mind.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

One day, you might look up and see me playing the game at 50. Don't laugh. Never say never, because limits, like fears, are often just an illusion.

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

You have been professing yourself reluctant to throw off your load of illusion because truth was uncertain. Well, it is certain now, yet the burden still weighs you down, while other people are given wings on freer shoulders, people who have not worn themselves out with research, nor spent a decade and more reflecting on these questions.

It is a curious fact that of all the illusions that beset mankind none is quite so curious as that tendency to suppose that we are mentally and morally superior to those who differ from us in opinion.

The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind.

Hope is a delusion; no hand can grasp a wave or a shadow.

That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.

Chasing after a pleasure to ease a pain is like running after a breeze to cool you down.

Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.

The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.

Who would be so mocked with glory, or to liveBut in a dream of friendship,To have his pomp and all what state compoundsBut only painted, like his varnished friends?

A man often imagines that he acts, when he is acted upon.

The truth is ugly: we have art so as not to perish from the truth.

He reached for his pocket, and found there, only reality

The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.

Knowing the future is the flower of the Way, and the beginning of folly.

Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do, and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously.

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.

Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.

Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.