7c7daa4
|
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
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|
illusion
intelligence
self-deception
ignorance
|
Saul Bellow |
1f8a94e
|
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
|
|
gains
understanding
progress
illusion
future
science
hope
inspirational
knowledge
|
Sigmund Freud |
1d8ac08
|
How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied--or, for that matter, awarded--because someone failed to see you properly? How many friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some element of your personality that shone through for only an instant, and in circumstances you could never reproduce? An illusion of water shimmering at the far bend of a highway.
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|
personality
illusion
life
misunderstanding
|
Kevin Brockmeier |
b640800
|
In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous.
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|
illusion
trust
|
Elie Wiesel |
cf7e35a
|
What an utter disgrace it would be to find something truly magic and spend any time at all pretending and trying to convince yourself it is all just an unbelievably orchestrated and beautifully choreographed illusion.
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|
illusion
magic
inspirational
|
Tyler Knott Gregson |
4adff3f
|
Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain. She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.
|
|
pain
illusion
tess-of-the-d-urbervilles
thomas-hardy
|
Thomas Hardy |
12eccab
|
The whole thing's illusion, [Jacob], and there's nothing wrong with that. It's what people want from us. It's what they expect.
|
|
illusion
sarah-gruen
water-for-elephants
expect
|
sara gruen |
f7d01d4
|
It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?
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|
true-love
illusion
relationships
love
wisdom
|
Nora Ephron |
4f41c64
|
I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic. I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts, it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.
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|
illusion
life
truth
|
Irvin D. Yalom |
c01fe2c
|
Everyone has gods. You just don't think they're gods.
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|
illusion
god
theology
|
Terry Pratchett |
b37e94c
|
You know Sven? The man who takes care of the gym?' he asked. He waited till he got a nod from Nicholson. 'Well, if Sven dreamed tonight that his dog died, he'd have a very, very bad night's sleep, because he's very fond of that dog. But when he woke up in the morning, everything would be all right. He'd know it was only a dream.' Nicholson nodded. 'What's the point exactly?' The point is if his dog really died, it would be exactly the same thing. Only he wouldn't know it. I mean he wouldn't wake up till he died himself.
|
|
illusion
dream
teddy
|
J.D. Salinger |
c765a05
|
That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
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|
illusion
world
unknown
|
Virginia Woolf |
1f58dda
|
I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould. I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was. I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face in which all things were graven. I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.
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|
prejudice
illusion
reality
perspectives
perception
|
Kahlil Gibran |
a3d0dcd
|
There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.
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|
illusion
greed
|
Wallace Stegner |
c07bec7
|
"Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy."
|
|
lover
madness
enlightenment
illusion
imagination
love
craving
platohtenment
divinity
divine
|
Thomas Moore |
0a8410f
|
I was overpowered by the mere sensation of that dream and it alone survived in my sorely wounded heart.
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|
pain
illusion
dreams
sadness
heart
hope
lifeless
soulless
sensation
wounds
emptiness
|
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
4dc4a38
|
Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so.
|
|
sex
literature
illusion
television
cable-television
cable-television-in-the-us
conservatism-in-the-us
gore-vidal
william-f-buckley
conservatism
united-states
perception
guilt
|
Christopher Hitchens |
bf82ab1
|
It's easier to believe the most outlandish lie that confirms what you suspect than the most obvious truth that denies it.
|
|
illusion
lie
|
Michael J. Sullivan |
d2cc4e3
|
What's life? A frenzied, blurry haze. What's life? Not anything it seems. A shadow. Fiction filling reams. All we possess on earth means nil, For life's a dream, think what you will, And even all our dreams are dreams.
|
|
illusion
reality
|
Pedro Calderón de la Barca |
cade64d
|
Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same things.
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|
illusion
education
culture
|
Jack London |
4b348df
|
Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.
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|
metaphor
self-knowledge
illusion
freedom
reason
cognitive-science
embodied-mind
limitation
thought
|
George Lakoff |
d228558
|
I don't mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusion about freedom plague them both.
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|
illusion
religion
zoo
|
Yann Martel |
d68340e
|
You are the stuff of which consumer profiles - American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model - are made. When you're staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn't it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine?
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|
money
illusion
|
Jay McInerney |
698dddd
|
I don't think anybody'd remember and certainly do know everybody'd lie. The reason I'm so bitter and, as I said, 'in anguish,' nowadays, or one of the reasons, is that everybody's begun to lie and because they lie they assume that I lie too: they overlook the fact that I remember very well many things (of course I've forgotten some...) I do believe that lying is a sin, unless it's innocent lie based on lack of memory, certainly the giving of false evidence and being a false witness is a mortal sin, but what I mean is, insofar as lying has become so prevalent in the world today (thanks to Marxian Dialectical propaganda and Comitern techniques among other causes) that, when a man tells the truth, everybody, looking in the mirror and seeing a liar... ...like those LSD heads in newspaper photographs who sit in parks gazing rapturously at the sky to show how high they are when they're only victims momentarily of a contraction of the blood vessels and nerves in the brain that causes the illusion...
|
|
lying
illusion
truth
marxian-dialectical-propaganda
lsd
lie
sin
|
Jack Kerouac |
435ed0d
|
Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm?
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|
illusion
reality
truth
|
Donna Tartt |
ea9fb60
|
"Gatsby's self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince is many ways identical to my father's. Like Gatsby, my father fueled this transformation with the "colossal vitality of his illusion". Unlike Gatsby he did this on a school teacher's salary."
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|
illusion
gatsbypoor
school-teacher
rich
|
Alison Bechdel |
73802fd
|
Live knowing that you are already dust, long gone, already outside time and looking in, reviewing life, finally understanding every deja vu, your own guardian angel. Know that the scorched-black demons and the pristine, fluttering seraphs are in some sense naught but you yourself unpacked, unfolded in a higher space from whence the myriad gods unfurl, not bygone legends but your once and future selves, your attributes blossomed into their purest and most potent symbol-forms. And these, with all their beast-heats, crowns and lightings, all their different colors, are become combined into the single whiteness that is godhead. That is . This, then, is revelation. All is one, and all is deity, this beautiful undying fire of being that is everywhere about us; that we are. O man, o woman, know yourself, and know you are divine. Respect yourself, respect the least phenomenon of your existence as it were the breath of God. Know that our universe is all one place, a single firelit room, all time a single moment. Know that there has only ever been one person here. Know you are everything, forever. Know I love you.
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|
unity
illusion
nonduality
apocalypse
unity-of-all-people
divinity
|
Alan Moore |
f31a8a6
|
Money! Money! Money! shrieking mad celestial money of illusion! Money made of nothing, starvation, suicide! Money of failure! Money of death! Money against Eternity! and eternity's strong mills grind out vast paper of Illusion!
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|
money
illusion
|
Allen Ginsberg |
5a65531
|
"The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men's House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility ... The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; they younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream--the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance."
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|
progress
illusion
business
disillusionment
race
|
Ralph Ellison |
020c0f1
|
You fight your superficiality, you shallowness, as as to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untank-like as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong, you might as well have the brain if a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and them you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words, and then proposing that there word people are closer to the real thing than we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you.
|
|
illusion
truth
judgement
|
Philip Roth |
46e2e79
|
...it had probably been a long enough life. Yet suddenly it all seemed like an illusion, a dream that had happened to someone else. What an odd thing existence was.
|
|
illusion
life
life-is-a-dream
reflection
|
Kate Atkinson |
2103a9c
|
My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it.
|
|
illusion
illusionists
|
Tahir Shah |
f8153b0
|
..no meal is good enough to justify all the money and effort wasted in preparing it. It is an illusion and an expense. Live as I do, undeceived.
|
|
illusion
meal
waste
|
Peter S. Beagle |
7e394b3
|
I was very invested in love but it was just this long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's about getting off.
|
|
sex
illusion
relationship
love
investment
moment
|
Chuck Palahniuk |
1a94b26
|
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish if we are to live in society. It is one I have long ago banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be.
|
|
live
illusion
people
banished
banishment
cherish
liking
wish
society
be
|
John Fowles |
2c24070
|
The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. 'Good is a transcendent reality' means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.
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|
illusion
good
real
transcendence
human-nature
|
Iris Murdoch |
9dc2c37
|
The same virtues, in the end, the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of faith.
|
|
unity
illusion
good
fantasy
love
self
vision
intellect
|
Iris Murdoch |
a6a6e51
|
And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us: they suggest a more comprehensible and thus more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.
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|
illusion
human
character-building
novel-writing
novel
|
E.M. Forster |
a4a21fc
|
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
|
|
literature
illusion
subterfuge
drama
|
Iris Murdoch |
1ec9d2d
|
There is no spoon.
|
|
illusion
funny
matrix
wizard
|
Jim Butcher |
9d59e5e
|
There is really no natural limit to the practice of loving kindness in meditation or in one's life. It is an ongoing, ever-expanding realization of interconnectedness. It is also its embodiment. When you can love one tree or one flower or one dog or one place, or one person or yourself for one moment, you can find all people, all places, all suffering, all harmony in that one moment. Practicing in this way is not trying to change anything or get anywhere, although it might look like it on the surface. What it is really doing is uncovering what is always present. Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone. (...). Make sure that you are not to help anybody else or the planet. Rather, you are simply holding them in awareness, honoring them, wishing them well, opening to their pain with kindness and compassion and acceptance.
|
|
illusion
kindness
compassion
life
love
all-people
all-places
expanding
honouring
opening-to-pain
uncovering
unlimited
well-wishing
everywhere
interconnectedness
touched
loving
loving-kindness
mindfulness
realisation
presence
meditation
harmony
awareness
|
Jon Kabat-Zinn |
9218fc9
|
"Hypocrisy--in other words, the practice of lying about lying--shields us from seeing ourselves as we are: a collocation of fragments that fit together as a biological unit but not as anything else, not as that ghost which has been called a self, a phantasm whose ecotoplasmic unreality we can never see through. By staying true to the lie of the self, the ego, we can hold onto the illusion that we will be who we are all our lives and not see our selves die a thousand times before our death. While some have dedicated themselves to getting to the bottom of how these parts create the illusion of a whole, this is not how pyramids are built. To get a pyramid off the ground takes a lot of ego--the base material of those stacks of stones that tourists visit while on vacation. Of course, a pyramid is actually a polyhedron, that is, a mathematical conception which pyramids in the physical world resemble . . . at least from a distance. The nearer one gets to a pyramid, the more it reveals itself to be what it is: a roughly pyramidal conglomeration of bricks, a composition of fragments that is not what it seems to be. This is also how it works with humans. The world around us encourages the build up of our egos--those pyramids of self-esteem--as if we needed such encouragement. Although everyone is affected by this pyramid scheme, some participate in it more than others: they are observably more full of themselves and tend to their egos as they would exotic plants in a hothouse. It helps if they can wear down the self-esteem of others, or simply witness this erosion. As the American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal said famously and often: "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail." None of this could work without the distance we put between what we are and what we think we are. Then we may appear to exist apart from our constituent elements. Self-esteem would evaporate without a self to esteem. As with pyramids, it is only at a distance that this illusion can be pulled off. Hypocrisy is that distance."
|
|
illusion
hipocrisy
self
|
Thomas Ligotti |
69bed12
|
George: Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Martha: I am, George. I am.
|
|
illusion
bittersweet-endings
echo
ironic-echo
bittersweet
ironic
|
Edward Albee |
2dad721
|
I feel the illusion I've twirled around me like a sari start to come undone and fall to my feet.
|
|
illusion
|
Mohsin Hamid |