Illusions Quotes

“And when I fall in love,” I began, "I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both worlds, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact. And the purple grass will grow all around, high enough to reach our eyes.”
― V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic

“Those who are unhappy
clutch at shadows, and to
give themselves an enjoyment
that truth refuses them, they
artfully bring into being all
sorts of illusions.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Crimes of Love

“ Any relationship with long-term potential has a honeymoon period, however brief, marked by the happy illusion that one's lover might be uniquely perfect. This fool's paradise is sustained by the elaborate deception artfully employed in every courtship: the diplomatic dodging of difficult issues, the careful concealing of unflattering flaws, and the strategic stressing of charming virtues. But as trust increases and each person grows weary of maintaining this initial beguilement, the blissfully blurry lens through which the other is perceived eventually refocuses to a clearer picture.”
― Zack Love, Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC

“Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression. But that was probably a shaky theory, for some men who work the hardest have nothing to express. A hypothesis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life – that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality. Both work and play, ordinarily, are illusions. Neither serves any solid or permanent purpose. But life, stripped of such illusions, instantly becomes unbearable. Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property. He strives for the coy eyewink called fame. He founds a family, and spends his curse over others. All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape the tragic-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally, is not worth living. So he confects artificialities to make it so. So he erects a gaudy structure to conceal the fact that it is not so.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I don't want you to taint that fragile coat of astonishing colors created by my illusions, which no painter has ever been able to reproduce. Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions give them?”
― Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

“We are all united by both pain and love. Both a smile and a wound. We are all united by these very basic yet very influential things, because we all recognize them, we all know what they feel like to have or to give. Everything else, all the other things that do not unite us— those things are all illusions.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“the paradox is that God must destroy in us, all illusions of righteousness before he can make us righteous”
― Martin Luther

“Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.”
― Thomas Clifford Allbutt

“Il y a des illusions touchantes qui sont peut-être des réalités sublimes.”
― Victor Hugo

“Good and bad are illusions. What exists is either the presence of empathy or the lack of it. I think this should become the new, clear definition of how we see people. No more "good" and no more "bad". Those terms are highly subjective.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“A moment of torture feels like an eternity, while an eternity of joy passes in a moment. Perhaps time is naught but an illusion.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“What man does not seek the power of his dreams, and believe in his ability to match the grace of his illusions.”
― Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness

“Life is about going with the flow of time...
Every single moment is becoming a past & every past needs us to let them stay as is untouched... Every single moment demands you to go... Don't turn back it's nothing there except the deceptive reality the illusions they are nothing but projections of our own mind the memories we want them relive...”
― Mohammad Shahzaib Ansari

“Take this drink as a token of
my disrepute and spin that hay tonight and tomorrow it will be shining golden bright in whatever heavy delirious weave you wish to make.”
― Initially NO, Wolfing it down

“We need our marks, our small illusions; few of us can bear to go naked into the world's gaze. And people will kill to keep their clothes.”
― Anne Perry, Silence in Hanover Close

“...He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: "Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lovely sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories: Volume 4

“The general economic growth of the quarter of a century that followed World War II not surprisingly created many illusions. In the West, people thought that they had found in Keynesianism the definitive solution to the problem of crises and unemployment. It was thus thought that the world had entered into an era of perpetual prosperity and definitive mastery of the business cycle. In the socialist world, it was also thought that the model formula for even higher growth had been discovered which enabled Khruschev to announce victoriously that by 1980 the USSR would have overtaken the united States "in every domain." In the third world of Africa and Asia, the national liberation movements which had seized political independence, also had a battery of prescriptions which, in a mix of capitalist and socialist recipes, in doses that varied from case to case, would enable these movements to overcome "underdevelopment" in "interdependence.”
― Samir Amin

“Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Take this drink as a token of my disrepute and spin that hay tonight and tomorrow it will be shining golden bright in whatever heavy delirious weave you wish to make.”
― Initially NO, Wolfing it down

“He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition. He had not even had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week."

(The Capital of the World)”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War

“I realized that no matter how safe a person or place felt, in our world, safety was merely an illusion.”
― Yasmine Galenorn, Night Vision

“What happiness there had been in those days! What freedom! What hope! What an abundance of illusions! She had none left now. Each new venture had cost her some of them, each of her successive conditions: as virgin, wife and mistress; she had lost them all along the course of her life, like a traveler who leaves some of his wealth at every inn along the road.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: "Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lovely sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“When people don’t travel to places different from those they inhabit in their routines they become habituated to the actualities of their worlds. They see things as one, knowing what they see is true. Nothing in their experience has the possibility of exposing the frailty of their illusions, of self, of world, of morality and each other.”
― Jeffrey Panzer, Epoch Awakening

“Once you transcend the illusions you will discover that — you — are the most thrilling experience you will ever have.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“I wondered if that one
shade of blue really kept the carpenter bees from nesting. I wondered if those bees really believed it was the sky.
It’s crazy what you see if you aren’t really looking.”
― Kami Garcia and Margret Stohl

“Новое искусство воз- никнет где-то на стыке технологий осознанного сна и гипноза. Художник будущего будет писать человеческие жизни. А потом предлагать – или заставлять других пережить во сне созданный им скрипт, превращая его в полноценный чувственный опыт. Грань между искус- ством и жизнью исчезнет полностью. Мало того, художник сделается подобным Богу. Он сможет решать, что, как и когда произойдет со зрителем, упаковывая в этот принудительный рисунок даже то, что кажется индивидууму всплесками его свободной воли...”
― Виктор Пелевин

“Earth is a place of limited illusions...”
― Ryan Formanes

“The world is full of alluring, flashy and thrilling experiences, which are illusionary traps — they are paths to nowhere.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life