Mirages Quotes - Page 3

• The political mirage of something for nothing, from leaders who 'care,' has ruined many a nation.

  Thomas Sowell

  Leader, Political, Who Cares

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• I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.

  Neil Gaiman

  Dream, Men, Years

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• All of the universes are but phantoms, mirages, and while they have their own essence, their own pantomime - they pass forgotten.

  Frederick Lenz

  Essence, Phantoms, Forgotten

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• Everything is an illusion; that is the whole thing about it - illusion, immitation, a mirage. It makes me too sad. Its having like a good dream, you know you are going to wake up.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Dream, Wake Up, Illusion

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• If you can accept the flow of life and give in to it, you will be accepting what is real. Only when you accept what is real can you live with it in peace and happiness. The alternative is a struggle that will never end because it is a struggle with the unreal, with a mirage of life instead of life itself.

  Deepak Chopra

  Real, Struggle, Acceptance

  "Spiritual Solutions #15: Find the Flow" by Deepak Chopra, Annie B. Bond, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 12, 2010.

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• Your writer, your scientist, your chief official, all have lost the power to revive the early illusion concerning fame and high place. Their beauty and delight is like the mirage in the heavens, only plain to the eye outside; within is nothing.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Eye, Power, Heaven

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• Go out of the house to see the moon, and 't is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who could ever clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: 't is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Knowledge, Moon

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.38, Penguin

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• What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.

  Theodor Adorno

  Men, World, Causes

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• Know all things to be like this: A mirage, a cloud castle, A dream, an apparition, Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen. Know all things to be like this: As the moon in a bright sky In some clear lake reflected, Though to that lake the moon has never moved. Know all things to be like this: As an echo that derives From music, sounds, and weeping, Yet in that echo is no melody. Know all things to be like this: As a magician makes illusions Of horses, oxen, carts and other things, Nothing is as it appears.

  Gautama Buddha

  Dream, Buddhist, Horse

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• In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

  Mark Kurlansky

  Love, Two, People

  Mark Kurlansky (2003). “Salt: A World History”, p.15, Penguin

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• Spirit vibrated into matter; hence, both Spirit and matter exist. Matter, however, does not exist in the way that it appears to us. It exists as we see it owing to the delusive force of maya, which makes the indivisible Spirit seem finite and divisible to all appearances. Matter has existence in the same delusive way as does a mirage in the desert.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Doe, Desert, Owing

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• Men are tending to materialism. Houses, lands, and worldly goods attract their attention, and as a mirage lure them on to death. Christianity, on the other hand leads only the natural body to death, and for the spirit, it points out a house not built with hands, eternal in the heavens... Let me urge you to follow Him, not as the Nazarene, the Man of Galilee, the carpenter's son, but as the ever living spiritual person, full of love and compassion, who will stand by you in life and death and eternity.

  James A. Garfield

  Spiritual, Son, Men

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• But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.

  Deb Caletti

  Attitude, Water, Desert

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• [T]here is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture -- in front of us -- our own little mirage that we think is the future.

  Lorraine Hansberry

  Thinking, Circles, Littles

  Lorraine Hansberry (2011). “A Raisin in the Sun”, p.116, Vintage

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• The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.

  Tom Robbins

  Laughter, Reality, Thinking

  "Gracie goes to schooner school" by Tom Robbins, www.seattlepi.com. May 24, 2007.

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• If you give your soul up to anything earthly, whether it be the wealth, or the honours, or the pleasures of this world, you might as well hunt after the mirage of the desert or try to collect the mists of the morning, or to store up for yourself the clouds of the sky, for all these things are passing away.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Morning, Clouds, Sky

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• Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

  Daniel Kahneman

  Successful, Knowing, Luck

  Daniel Kahneman (2011). “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, p.236, Macmillan

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• The 1990's will be a determining period of time for another cycle. If humanity during this time chooses to throw away a lot of the mirages and illusions it's fooled itself with, we will enter a very bright and golden age. It won't happen in one day.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Humanity, Age

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• If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream-a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows-is essentially poetry.

  Michel Leiris

  Love, Dream, Eye

  Michel Leiris (1987). “Nights as day, days as night”, Rizzoli Intl Pubns

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• I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.

  Thomas Merton

  Success, Writing, Mean

  Thomas Merton (1996). “Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk & Writer”, Harper San Francisco

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• Thought, stumbling, plods Past fallen temples, vanished gods, Altars unincensed, fanes undecked, Eternal systems flown or wrecked; Through trackless centuries that grant To the poor trudge refreshment scant, Age after age, pants on to find A melting mirage of the mind.

  Alfred Austin

  Past, Mind, Age

  Alfred Austin (1885). “At the Gate of the Convent: And Other Poems”

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• The experiences which drugs induce are as far removed from Reality as is a mirage, from water. No matter how much you pursue the mirage, you will never quench your thirst, and the search for Truth through drugs must end in disillusionment.

  Meher Baba

  Reality, Water, Drug

  "An analysis of the problems presented in the use of LSD" by Graham C. Taylor, M.D., www.unodc.org. January 1, 1967.

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• God, she was beautiful - my first image of the Orient - a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage.

  Amin Maalouf

  Beautiful, Eye, Hair

  Amin Maalouf (1998). “Samarkand”, Interlink Publishing Group Incorporated

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• The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind. However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity. ---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss

  Brian Aldiss

  Creativity, Men, Years

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• That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.

  Charles Dickens

  Cities, Mind, Vision

  Charles Dickens, Gillen D'Arcy Wood (2003). “A Tale of Two Cities”, p.385, Barnes & Noble

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