Illusion Quotes - Page 26

• I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war...suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

  Philip Caputo

  Peace, War, Fighting

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• No doubt the truth is hard to come by for those who do not like the sound of it - dreams and illusions are so much more pleasant.

  Anatoli Granovsky

  Dream, Truth, Doubt

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• A respect for authority is the basis for most medical education. Students may become so used to memorising that they become prey to the illusion that the reason for learning to parrot lectures and textbooks is that they are the 'truth'.

  Petr Skrabanek

  Truth, Textbooks, May

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• Therefore, philosophy does not give sense in mind happiness. It keeps in mind the only truth. However, it is very possible that the truth may be painful, may be distressing, may be destructive of happiness or makes it impossible. Religion, unlike philosophy, is under the category of the useful one. It promises happiness and says what it is necessary to do and what it is necessary to be to deserve or to obtain it. Consequently, illusion is more important than truth if it gets happiness.

  Marcel Conche

  Truth, Philosophy, Giving

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• Everything is illusion, except for the Divine Love of God that is all-pervading which you can feel through your Spirit.

  Nirmala Srivastava

  Love, Wisdom, Yoga

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• All that happens is the cause of all that happens. Causes are numberless; the idea of a sole cause is an illusion.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Spiritual, Ideas, Causes

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• "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

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• ... 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

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• I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.

  Sigmund Freud

  Love, Differences, Criticism

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• When one has an image about oneself one is surely insane, one lives in a world of illusion.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Self Esteem, Insane, World

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1973). “Flight of the Eagle”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.

  Thomas Boswell

  Sports, Baseball, Understood

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• I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not led him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle.

  Thomas Huxley

  Strong, Science, Intelligent

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1997). “The Major Prose of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.277, University of Georgia Press

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• What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Envy, Expectations, Socialism

  Ludwig Von Mises (1962). “The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method”

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• The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?

  Baron d'Holbach

  Independent, Thinking, Desire

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• If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.

  Albert Einstein

  Taken, Moon, Men

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• The afternoon is bright, with spring in the air, a mild March afternoon, with the breath of April stirring, I am alone in the quiet patio looking for some old untried illusion - some shadow on the whiteness of the wall some memory asleep on the stone rim of the fountain, perhaps in the air the light swish of some trailing gown.

  Antonio Machado

  Wall, Memories, Spring

  Antonio Machado, Alan S. Trueblood (1982). “Antonio Machado”, p.75, Harvard University Press

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• In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Mother, Lonely, Teacher

  Daniel J. Boorstin (1962). “The Image or What Happened to the American Dream”

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• Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Views, Design

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Reality is an illusion created by a lack of alcohol.

  N. F. Simpson

  Drinking, Food, Reality

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• Think hard about the reasons for believing and not believing, what your religion teaches you and demands so inexorably that you believe. I am convinced that if you follow closely the natural light of your spirit, you will see ... that all the religions in the world are only human inventions and that everything your religion teaches you and forces you to believe as supernatural and divine is at heart only error, lie, illusion and trickery.

  Jean Meslier

  Atheist, Lying, Believe

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• Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see - not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Sports, Business, Children

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• Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control.

  Jack Kornfield

  Meditation, Illusion Of Control, Surrender

  Twitter post from Jan 26, 2015

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• There is an illusion of central position, justifying one's own purposes as right and everybody else¹s as wrong, and providing a proper degree of paranoia. Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Mean, Justice, Guilt

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• Even strong as they are today, rich countries should have no illusion: nobody is safe in aworld of injustices.War will never bring security.War can only generate monsters: bitterness, intolerance, fundamentalism, and the damaging denial of current hegemonies.The poor must be given reasons to live, not to kill or die.

  Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

  Country, Strong, War

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• You can't learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.

  Barry Lopez

  Education, Time, Learning

  Barry Lopez (2013). “Desert Notes and River Notes”, p.6, Open Road Media

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