#Illusion Quotes

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

“A dream itself is but a shadow.”

“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.”

“Is this a vision? Is this a dream? Do I sleep?”

“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.”

“For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.”

“Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feelings as to sight?”

“That affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence.”

“If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber'd here While these visions did appear.”

“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?”

“Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate.”

“the fire seven times tried this; seven times tried that judgement is that did never choose amiss some there be that shadows kiss; such have but a shadows bliss, there be fool alive, i wis silverd o'er, and so was this Take what wife you will to bed I will ever be your head. So be gone; you are sped.”

“The most dangerous thing is illusion.”

“Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals”

“Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.”

“I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.”

“Traveling is a fool's paradise.”

“We know that madness belongs to love,--what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven.”

“Reality is blocked by form and image.”

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

“Look at the moon in the sky, not the one in the lake.”

“Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.”

“Leave that which is not,but appears to be.Seek that which is,but is not apparent.”

“The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.”

“He is like a man using a candle to look for the sun”

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

“O the world is but a word; were it all yours to give it in a breath, how quickly were it gone!”

“I saw many humans on whom there were no clothes. I saw many clothes in which there were no humans.”

“People are distracted by objects of desire, and afterwards repent of the lust they've indulged, because they have indulged with a phantom and are left even farther from Reality than before. Your desire for the illusory is a wing, by means of which a seeker might ascend to Reality. When you have indulged a lust, your wing drops off; you become lame and that fantasy flees. Preserve the wing and don't indulge such lust, so that the wing of desire may bear you to Paradise. People fancy they are enjoying themselves, but they are really tearing out their wings for the sake of an illusion.”

“There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.”

“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.”

“There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.”

“The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.”

“The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.”

“My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd."This Land of Saints," and then as the applause died out,"Of plaster Saints;" his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.”

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

“Civilisation is hooped together, broughtUnder a rule, under the semblance of peaceBy manifold illusion.”

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

“O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.”

“We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.”

“There is no past. That's another illusion. Everything that has ever happened to you, to me, to anyone in this world, happened in the present moment. That's all there ever is. So your relationship to life isn't your relationship to your past, it's your relationship to the present moment.”

“The depths of the sea are only water after all.”

“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.”

“Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.”

“An age is the reversal of an age:When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone,We lived like men that watch a painted stage.What matter for the scene, the scene once gone:It had not touched our lives.”

“The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.”

“We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.”

“And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind,Or who have found a painter to make them so for payAnd smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind:I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.”

“To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.”

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”