ILLUSION QUOTES
quotations about illusion
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Illusions", The Conduct of Life
It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is -- since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Selected Letters
An illusion dissipated is an experience gained.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE, Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
The child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does not like to have disturbed.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Illusions", The Conduct of Life
A man cannot drink from a mirage, but he can drown in it.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
Illusion is Reality's coy lover who cheers him when he is grim. Illusion is cunning to his wisdom of ages, sweet oblivion to his knowledge. A bounty to his lack.
KRESLEY COLE
Kiss of a Demon King
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
W. H. AUDEN
The Age of Anxiety
The only cure for loss of illusions is fresh illusions, more illusions, and always illusions.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Glory of Clementina
Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom
But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
Love in a Time of Cholera
One realized all sorts of things. The value of an illusion, for instance, and that the shadow can be more important than the substance.
JEAN RHYS
Quartet
Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other.
EMIL CIORAN
Drawn and Quartered
In youth, we feel the richer for every new illusion; in mature years, for every one we lose.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles," The Writings of Madame Swetchine
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
We are awkward at espousing the illusions of our fellow men, but we do not want to be so stupid as to drop out of step.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
People are distracted by objects of desire, and afterwards repent of the lust they've indulged, because they have indulged with a phantom and are left even farther from Reality than before. Your desire for the illusory is a wing, by means of which a seeker might ascend to Reality. When you have indulged a lust, your wing drops off; you become lame and that fantasy flees. Preserve the wing and don't indulge such lust, so that the wing of desire may bear you to Paradise. People fancy they are enjoying themselves, but they are really tearing out their wings for the sake of an illusion.
JALALUDDIN RUMI
quoted in The Pocket Rumi Reader
Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has.
JUAN GABRIEL VASQUEZ
The Sound of Things Falling
When one illusion doesn't work then we become disillusioned and we go around with our antennae up looking for another illusion.
ANAM THUBTEN
No Self, No Problem
All of your illusions are reflected in your cosmic dance. The whole universe as well as the infinitesimal atoms are under the spell of your dance-movements. In the swinging of your tuneful rhythmic dance, bondage and freedom are balanced through ages and aeons. I am amazed at your infinity.
M. KRONEGGER
The Orchestration of the Arts