Illusion Quotes - Page 24

• We can be seduced...by powerful political groups that promise more wealth and lower taxes. Those with power can use clever, psychological tricks and play upon our weaknesses and brokenness in order to attract us to their way of thinking. We can be manipulated into illusion.

  Jean Vanier

  Clever, Powerful, Thinking

  Jean Vanier (2003). “Finding Peace”, p.53, A&C Black

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• They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?

  Kate Braverman

  Love, Men, Marijuana

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• We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

  William Golding

  Race, Mad, Confusion

  WILLIAM GOLDING (1979). “DARKNESS VISIBLE”

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• Crowds create illusions.

  Rajneesh

  Crowds

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• All our attachments are outward oriented and hence this illusion.

  Rajneesh

  Attachment

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• We're hallucinating. And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.

  Marianne Williamson

  Real, Anxiety, World

  Marianne Williamson (2009). “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles”, p.23, Harper Collins

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• Bijli fails in the dead of night / Won’t help to call “I need a light” / You’re in Karachi now / Oh, oh you’re in Karachi now. / Night is falling and you just cant see / Is this illusion or KESC / You’re in Karachi now

  Kamila Shamsie

  Fall, Night, Light

  Kamila Shamsie (2010). “Kartographie”, p.76, ebook Berlin Verlag

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• She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.

  Zelda Fitzgerald

  Fall, Glasses, Essence

  Zelda Fitzgerald (2013). “Save Me the Waltz: A Novel”, p.44, Simon and Schuster

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• They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.

  Patricia Highsmith

  Past, People, Realization

  Patricia Highsmith (1999). “Talented Mr. Ripley ; Ripley under ground ; Ripley's game”, Random House, Inc.

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• Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm, or the gods, or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.

  George R. R. Martin

  Real, Fall, Trying

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• Friendship was another illusion like love, though it did not reach the same mad heights. People pretended that they were friends, when the fact was they were brought together by force of circumstances.

  R.K. Narayan

  Like Love, People, Mad

  R. K. Narayan (2009). “Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher”, p.251, Everyman's Library

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• Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.

  Anthony Marra

  Years, Different, Next

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• It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.

  Hugh Howey

  Loss, Blow, Humbling

  "Wool Omnibus Edition". Book by Hugh Howey, January 25, 2012.

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• True love means you love the real person, not an ideal that you have in your head and superimpose over them. That's illusion and lies to me.

  Laurell K. Hamilton

  Real, Lying, Mean

  Laurell K. Hamilton (2013). “Affliction”, p.221, Penguin

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• This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

  David Levithan

  Character, Reality, Giving

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• It's an illusion I've noticed before-- words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It only lasts while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.

  Elizabeth Wein

  Fall, Oxygen, Paper

  Elizabeth Wein (2013). “Rose Under Fire”, p.51, Egmont UK

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• If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be almost all friendships would be dissolved; the second effect, however, might be excellent, for a world without any friends would be felt to be intolerable, and we should learn to like each other without needing a veil of illusion to conceal from ourselves that we did not think each other absolutely perfect.

  Bertrand Russell

  Friendship, Thinking, Perfect

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “The Conquest of Happiness”, p.65, Lulu Press, Inc

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• The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

  Muhammad Iqbal

  Religious, Acceptance, Emotional

  Sir Muhammad Iqbal (2000). “The religious thought in Islam”

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• The reason the factions were evil is because there was no way out of them. They gave us the illusion of choice without actually giving us a choice.

  Veronica Roth

  Evil, Giving, Choices

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• And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

  Donna Tartt

  Art, Believe, Reality

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• All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Age, Youth, Made

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• Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Time, Ideas, Simultaneous

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• One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive one.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Innovation, Life Is, Hours

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• The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time...Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Dance, Play, Space

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• If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

  George Santayana

  Reality, Hypocrisy, World

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Dialogues in limbo. Platonism and the spiritual life. A long way round to Nirvana. The prestige of the infinite. Ultimate religion”

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