Illusion Quotes - Page 27

• Devote the mind to confusion and we know only too well, if we´re honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion, adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries. Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from illusion, and we will find that, with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, our mind will begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity.

  Sogyal Rinpoche

  Dark, Meditation Practice, Discipline

  Sogyal Rinpoche (2009). “Glimpse After Glimpse: Daily Reflections on Living and Dying”, p.11, Harper Collins

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction ... One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly from his wihes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.

  Sigmund Freud

  Men, Self, Support

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• Wherever desire exists ego exists, and wherever ego exists illusion exists because ego is the greatest illusion there is. Even in a beggar who has nothing else you will find the same ego as you will find in Alexander the Great, because desiring is the same. Alexander the Great may have much money and much power, that does not matter; he is still desiring. The beggar may not have anything, but he is also desiring.

  Rajneesh

  Ego, Desire, Doe

  4 Copy quote

• Let the American infidels bask in their illusion.

  Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf

  Funny, Military, Infidel

  4 Copy quote

• This was no ordinary UFO. Scores of people saw it. It was no illusion, no deception, no imagination.

  Azim Daudpota

  Military, People, Imagination

  7 Copy quote

• A woman should be an illusion

  Ian Fleming

  Women, Maturity, Should

  5 Copy quote

• When you interact with another, an illusion is part of this dynamic. This illusion allows each soul to perceive what it needs to understands in order to heal.

  Gary Zukav

  Love, Broken Heart, Order

  4 Copy quote

• I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.

  George Sand

  Love, Lying, Believe

  8 Copy quote

• That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science.

  Thomas Hunt Morgan

  Believe, Ignorance, Simple

  Thomas Hunt Morgan (1919). “The Physical basis of heredity”

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• 'By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and the void,' announced Democritus. The universe consists only of atoms and the void; all else is opinion and illusion. If the soul exists, it also consists of atoms.

  Edward Robert Harrison

  Science, Reality, Color

  Edward Robert Harrison (1986). “Masks of the universe”, Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every perception of color is an illusion, we do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.

  Josef Albers

  Color, Perception

  53 Copy quote

• The mind has its illusions as the sense of sight; and in the same manner that the sense of feeling corrects the latter, reflection and calculation correct the former.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Science, Reflection, Sight

  Pierre-Simon Laplace (2012). “A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities”, p.115, Courier Corporation

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• On foundations we believe in the reality of mathematics, but of course, when philosophers attack us with their paradoxes, we rush to hide behind formalism and say 'mathematics is just a combination of meaningless symbols,'... Finally we are left in peace to go back to our mathematics and do it as we have always done, with the feeling each mathematician has that he is working with something real. The sensation is probably an illusion, but it is very convenient.

  Jean Dieudonne

  Real, Believe, Feelings

  10 Copy quote

• We live our lives for our life's sake, rather than for illusions about rewards and satisfaction after we're dead.

  PZ Myers

  Religion, Atheism, Rewards

  18 Copy quote

• The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.

  Margaret Atwood

  Philosophical, Giving, Desire

  Margaret Atwood (2012). “Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986”, p.115, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that his liberty consists - in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in the power of mental record.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Men

  9 Copy quote

• At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our life, which is inaccessable to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.

  Thomas Merton

  God, Spiritual, Truth

  Thomas Merton (2012). “On Christian Contemplation”, p.41, New Directions Publishing

  61 Copy quote

  Show source

• Real peace comes only when you stop chasing it. When you relax your driving desire for comfort, real fulfillment arises. When you drop your hectic pursuit of gratification, the real beauty of life comes out. When you seek to know the reality without illusion, complete with all its pain and danger, that is when real freedfom and security are yours.

  Henepola Gunaratana

  Spiritual, Pain, Real

  15 Copy quote

• If we take shelter of the lotus feet of the spiritual master, we can become free from illusion, fear and distress. If we wholeheartedly beg for his mercy without any deceit then the spiritual master bestows all auspiciousness upon us.

  Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati

  Spiritual, Feet, Deceit

  18 Copy quote

• If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Spiritual, Reality, Survival

  Eckhart Tolle (2006). “A New Earth (Oprah #61): Awakening to Your Life's Purpose”, p.31, Penguin

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Man did not address his inquiries to the earth on which he stood until a remarkably late stage in the development of his desire for knowledge. And the answers he received to the questions, "Where do I come from?", "What is man?", although they made him poorer by a few illusions, gave him in compensation a knowledge of his past that is vaster than he could ever have dreamed. For it emerged that the history of life was his history too.

  Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald

  Men, Past, Desire

  4 Copy quote

• When you have lived longer in this world and outlived the enthusiastic and pleasing illusions of youth, you will find your love and pity for the race increase tenfold, your admiration and attachment to a particular party or opinion fall away altogether.

  Joseph Henry Shorthouse

  Life, Party, Fall

  Joseph Henry Shorthouse (1902). “John Ingelsant [by J.H. Shorthouse].”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• "Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

  John Green

  Real, Thinking, Sky

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.299, A&C Black

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• ... semantics ... is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions of being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense

  Alfred Tarski

  Real, Illusions Of Grandeur, Class

  17 Copy quote

• Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.

  Theodor Adorno

  Dream, Reality, Differences

  10 Copy quote