Best 163 quotes in «illusions quotes» category

All our emotions are real, but one has to be quite cautious with what supports their reality.

A bad magician never gets the good props.

All is il­lu­sion; noth­ing is re­al. There are no true win­dows or halls. The doors are not there and they can't hold the light. My life's not con­tained in these walls.

All spiritual techniques seek to awaken fallen man from the dream in which he lives : he dreams continuously of individual state of being, and of the many forms through which the external world presents itself to him; he builds for himself a paradise of illusions, so as to forget the absence of God. To recover the vision of the spiritual world, the soul of man must "die" to this dream, this ceaseless flow of images which fallen man regards as normal, everyday state of his consciousness.

A great magician is as divine as God and his stage is as majestic as the paradise.

A great magician is not more magical than other magicians; he is just more magical in his presentation.

An ever growing part of our major institutions’ functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by experts...The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature's perennial contribution.

And nothing's wrong when nothing's true But I live in a hologram with you.

A magician with decreasing practice sessions will give defective performances.

And it's his illusions about what constitutes the real world which are inhibiting him...His reality, his reason, his society ... These are what must be destroyed

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.

...any overlap between TV and reality is purely coincidental.

Any relationship with long-term potential has a honeymoon period, however brief, marked by the happy illusion that one's lover might be uniquely perfect. This fool's paradise is sustained by the elaborate deception artfully employed in every courtship: the diplomatic dodging of difficult issues, the careful concealing of unflattering flaws, and the strategic stressing of charming virtues. But as trust increases and each person grows weary of maintaining this initial beguilement, the blissfully blurry lens through which the other is perceived eventually refocuses to a clearer picture.

Are you glad to see me?

At its root, the logic is that of the Grand Inquisitor, who bitterly assailed Christ for offering people freedom and thus condemning them to misery. The Church must correct the evil work of Christ by offering the miserable mass of humanity the gift they most desire and need: absolute submission. It must “vanquish freedom” so as “to make men happy” and provide the total “community of worship” that they avidly seek. In the modern secular age, this means worship of the state religion, which in the Western democracies incorporates the doctrine of submission to the masters of the system of public subsidy, private profit, called free enterprise. The people must be kept in ignorance, reduced to jingoist incantations, for their own good. And like the Grand Inquisitor, who employs the forces of miracle, mystery, and authority “to conquer and hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness” and to deny them the freedom of choice they so fear and despise, so the “cool observers” must create the “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications” that keep the ignorant and stupid masses disciplined and content.

As adults we get so entrapped in illusions and trivia, that we forget the true essence of life; and so often we need to connect with children, to understand that it is the little, priceless joys that make life beautiful and worthy.

As a general rule, in the world of magic, the most successful magician is the one who has enough patience to keep the secrets of his original magic effects.

Beware of being trapped in your own imaginings. You instill sparks in others, you charge them with your illusions, and when they burst forth into illuminations, you are taken in.

A value debased and an illusion unmasked have the same pitiful shell.

Aww, come on. I don't bite...hard.

But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives—or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. Meditation may give us a fresher view of things, but it cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. The lesson of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendants of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds.

Enlightenment is not about attaining a ultimate level of intelligence or intellect. It is regained by shedding all the ideas, illusion and binds thrust on you and that you then so readily accrue.

But with me, you are never just a spring faerie.

Conflict forces us to be fully present because it shatters our ego – stripping away all hope of escape or sugar coating. It removes everything that is nonessential to our authentic being; it removes all superficial layers. Conflict is painful because it wakes us up out of our created illusions. And if we lean into it, conflict can be the catalyst to our enlightenment.

Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves … and other animals.

Don’t the stories we tell shape the views of our listeners? You ask me about Darkness, but whose Darkness do you know? Why was he presented to you?” asked Nagasaki dispassionately. She did not reply, startled by the unexpected answer. His questions confused her, and it suddenly occurred to her that, perhaps, her dreams have been orchestrated by someone.

Enlightenment is not about attaining an ultimate level of intelligence or intellect. It is regained by shedding all the ideas, illusion and binds thrust on you and that you then so readily accrue.

cause we don't hide, We parade our pride!

Death is but a dream and life is merely the daydream of death.

Den som har visjoner, bør oppsøke lege.

Divinity is accident of nature, magic is the work of an art.

Dreams, just dreams, it's all illusion

Earth is a place of limited illusions...

Falling in love is about hormones and pheromones and powerful emotions that overwhelm our better judgement. Staying in love requires time and effort and knowledge and trust that has to be earned over the course of lifetimes. Falling in love is the illusion. Staying in love is the real miracle.

Everyone lives bound by their own knowledge and awareness. They define that as reality; but knowledge and awareness are vage, and perhaps better called illusions.

General belief is “There is no real magic, only tricks” but a great magician compel people not to trust that belief and make them believe, after all "There does exist a real magic".

For other men --- men who are part of something, who follow a chief they believe in, or ways they were reared in from birth --- they can keep their eyes from seeing what they have not been taught to see, and do not want to see. But too late was I brought to my father’s house. I tried to be part of it, but I never could.

Freedom is to lose all illusions.

Fear is an illusionary place we travel to in our minds when we allow ourselves to move away from the heart.

Give royal treatment to your original magic effects, because one of the effects might make you the king of magic.

He focused on the world before him; the illusions and the mysteries of the future haunted his eyes.

Goliath symbolizes the vanity and the illusions of this world. They disappear in a puff

Happy Labour's day! Let's make a world with better illusions!

He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition. He had not even had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week." (The Capital of the World)

Good and bad are illusions. What exists is either the presence of empathy or the lack of it. I think this should become the new, clear definition of how we see people. No more "good" and no more "bad". Those terms are highly subjective.

He'd been back for about two weeks, and everything in Laurel's life had been thrown into Chaos. Sexy, sexy chaos.

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible. It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take places at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory. An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the caster oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig,whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe,is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

Here’s what's breaking into my imagination and whatever is in there; that you are not afraid you’ve seen, is yours to take.

Ideas about our own self-worth are no more real than thoughts about an imaginary chair.