Illusion Quotes - Page 37

• Ive said its a little bit like a magician performing for a convention of magicians... all the magicians in the audience watching this illusion-Do they see the illusion, or do they see the device that made the illusion? Probably they see a little of both.

  Chuck Close

  Littles, Made, Conventions

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• Democracy, Republic: What do these words signify? What have they changed in the world? Have men become better, more loyal, kinder? Are the people happier? All goes on as before, as always. Illusions, illusions.

  Haile Selassie

  Men, People, Democracy

  Interview with Oriana Fallaci in "The Chicago Tribune", June 24, 1973.

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• THE ULTIMATE METAPHYSICAL SECRET, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.

  Ken Wilber

  Reality, Two, Secret

  Ken Wilber (2001). “No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth”, p.30, Shambhala Publications

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• Spirituality is not primarily about values and ethics, not about exhortations to do right or live well. The spiritual traditions are primarily about reality...an effort to penetrate the illusions of the external world and to name its underlying truth.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Spiritual, Reality, Names

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• An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art.
  The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.

  Louis Sullivan

  Mother, Art, Mean

  Louis Sullivan, Robert Twombly (1988). “The Public Papers”, p.156, University of Chicago Press

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• A life that is truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual.

  Marion Woodman

  Essence, Burning, Veils

  Marion Woodman (1985). “The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation”

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• A life truly lived constantly burns away veils of illusion, burns away what is no longer relevant, gradually reveals our essence, until, at last, we are strong enough to stand in our naked truth.

  Marion Woodman

  Strong, Essence, Naked

  Marion Woodman (2001). “Coming Home to Myself: Reflections for Nurturing a Woman's Body and Soul”, p.93, Conari Press

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• Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people.

  Achim Steiner

  Independent, Reality, People

  "Bee deaths may signal wider pollination threat: U.N." by Alister Doyle, www.reuters.com. March 10, 2011.

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• Much of American wealth is an illusion which is being secretly gnawed away and much of it will be completely wiped out in the near future....So what is the rest of your future? A grisly list of unpleasant events -- exploding inflation, price controls, erosion of your savings (eventually to nothing), a collapse of private as well as government pension programs, and eventually an international monetary holocaust which will sweep all paper currencies down the drain and turn the world upside down.

  Howard Ruff

  Erosion, Government, Holocaust

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• Despair ... is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality - it's a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.

  Philip Slater

  Reality, People, Mourning

  Philip Slater (1974). “Earth-walk”

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• The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth.

  Robert Kuttner

  Justice, Growth, Belief

  Robert Kuttner (1987). “The Economic Illusion: False Choices Between Prosperity and Social Justice”, p.1, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• Let's call this then, only half facetiously, a new patristic, in which the intellectual is charged with the task not only to denounce error and unmask illusions, and not only to incarnate the mechanisms of new practices of knowledge, but also, together with others in a process of co-research, to produce a new truth. -- Commonwealth, 118

  Michael Hardt

  Errors, Practice, Intellectual

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• The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.

  Robert Warshow

  Attitude, Intelligent, Thinking

  Robert Warshow (1962). “The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre & Other Aspects of Popular Culture”, p.75, Harvard University Press

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• For those in love with an illusion often refuse to accept reality

  Sanal Edamaruku

  Atheist, Reality, Accepting

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• You are traveling and see these people shooting the entire experience of going through a city, and maybe in the back of their minds they sustain the illusion that they will edit it all, but I don't think that's it.

  Atom Egoyan

  Thinking, Cities, People

  Interview with Ron Burnett, rburnett.squarespace.com.

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• Ultimately, of course, you must decide for yourself whether the subjective psychological effects created by your evolved cognitive biases reflect an objective reality, perhaps as evidence that God designed your mind to be so receptive to Him. Or, just maybe, you will come to acknowledge that, like the rest of us, you are a hopeless pawn in one of natural selection's most successful hoaxes ever-and smile at the sheer ingenuity involved in pulling it off, at the very thought of such mindless cleverness. One can still enjoy the illusion of God, after all, without believing Him to be real.

  Jesse Bering

  Real, Believe, Successful

  Jesse Bering (2013). “The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life”, p.16, Nicholas Brealey Publishing

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• Human identity is fundamentally an illusion; it’s an evolutionary overhang which lets us function as coherent self-aware animals. But, on a deep level, we have no real evidence that when we wake up we’re the same person who went to sleep.

  Sarah Newton

  Real, Sleep, Animal

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• Today, when death and old age are increasingly concealed behind euphemisms and comforting baby talk, and life is threatened with being smothered in the mass consumption of hypnotic mechanized vulgarity, the need to confront man with the reality of his situation is greater than ever. For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions - and to laugh at it.

  Martin Esslin

  Baby, Lying, Reality

  Martin Esslin (2009). “The Theatre of the Absurd”, p.429, Vintage

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• We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.

  Karl Hess

  Children, Home, Exercise

  "From Far Right to Far Left". The New York Times Magazine, (p. 305), Decemebr 6, 1970.

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• In short, no association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People can't long tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her mistress, a teacher his pupil, a friend his friend nor a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a soldier his comrade nor a party-goer his companion, unless they sometimes have illusions about each other, make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Teacher, Husband, Party

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• This world is all a fleeting show, For man's illusion given The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow, Theres nothing true but Heaven.

  Charles Lamb

  Lying, Men, Shining

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• You go on being reincarnated until you reach the actual Truth. Heaven and Hell are just a state of mind. We are all here to become Christ-like. The actual world is an illusion.

  George Harrison

  Heaven, Mind, Goes On

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• This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

  Jack Abbott

  World, Release, This World

  Jack Henry Abbott (1982). “In the belly of the beast: letters from prison”, Vintage

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• It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

  C. L. R. James

  People, Deception, Sacred

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• There is no neatness in any life- great or small. It is only an illusion men foolishly pursue.
  All lived lives are a mess.
  The neatness in my life had begun to crumble some time before, but now it disintegrated completely as I vanished into a world of endlessly opening doors, teasing riddles and lives without boundaries.
  For the first time I began to understand how shallow neatness is.
  How cramping, how limiting.
  For the first time I understood neat lives are comatose lives. (the Alchemy of Desire 304)

  Tarun J. Tejpal

  Men, Doors, Desire

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