Quotes About Illusions In Life

“It's only when we dare to experience the full anxiety of knowing that life doesn't go on forever that we can experience transcendence and get in touch with the infinite. To use an analogy from gestalt psychology, Non-Being is the necessary ground for the figure of Being to make itself known to us. It's only when we're willing to let go of all of our illusions and admit that we are lost and helpless and terrified that we will be free of ourselves and our false securities and ready for what Kierkegaard calls "the leap of faith."
p. 43”

— Thomas Cathcart

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”

— J.G. Ballard

“I had no illusions that now, in some final and dramatic flash of revelation, we would understand one another. We were done. It was a fact of my life
intractable and sad
that our relationship had been a failure. Still, with her prognosis came one last chance to be her daughter. [p. 163]”

— Dani Shapiro

“If you are forced to confront your fears on a daily basis, they disintegrate, like illusions when viewed up close. Maybe being always protected made me more fearful, and I would later dip cautiously into the outside world, never allowing myself to be submerged completely, and always jerking back into the familiarity of my own life when my senses were overwhelmed. For years I would stand with a foot in each sphere, drawn to the exotic universe that lay on the other side of the portal, wrenched back by the warnings that sounded like alarm bells in my mind.”

— Deborah Feldman

“Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.”

— Kate Chopin

“For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.”

— Henry Adams

“The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned”

— Antonio Gramsci

“Upset The Established Order Of Your Life And Everything Becomes Chaos ... To A Degree That You Wont Be Able To Differentiate Between Mere Illusions And Solid Reality”

— Sherif A. El-Mawardy

“Let the fires of truth burn away your false life and your excuses, fears, blaming, doubts and illusions of insignificance.”

— Bryant McGill

“The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.”

— Sigmund Freud

“In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was a great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.
- The French Lieutenant's Woman”

— John Fowles

“To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life.”

— Sherwood Anderson

“Life on Earth is quite a bargain. Dreams, for one, don't charge admission. Illusions are costly only when lost.”

— WisÅ‚awa Szymborska

“For a man's life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.”

— Anatole France

“Man is created to be God's deputy on earth and it is important to realize the obligation to rid ourselves of all illusions and to make our lives a preparation for the next life.”

— Cat Stevens

“An individual's demarcations as a being, not his trespass of them, create his identity and preserve his illusion of being something special and not a freak of chance, a product of blind mutations. Transcending all illusions and their emergent activities-having absolute control of what we are and not what we need to be so that we may survive the most unsavory facts of life and death-would untether us from the moorings of our self-limited selves.”

— Thomas Ligotti

“Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.”

— Tim O'Brien

“Ah! poetry makes life what light and music do the stage-strip the one of the false embellishments, and the other of its illusions, and what is there real in either to live or care for?”

— Charles Dickens

“Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.”

— Erich Fromm

“The boy Paco had never known about any of this nor about what all these people would be doing on the next day and on other days to come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. He did not even realize they ended. 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.”

— Ernest Hemingway

“His lips are familiar. I know the shape of them, know how to make mine fit against them. His taste is familiar too. For all the illusions and colors and sweet smells ... he has always tasted like skin. His breaths are shallow. I'm holding his life against my tongue, between my rows of teeth. He's offering it up.”

— Lauren DeStefano

“I've looked at life from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all”

— Joni Mitchell

“Life never ceases. Life is an overflowing source, and death is only an obscure effect of illusions.”

— Andre Luiz Moreira

“So much of life was the peeling away of illusions.”

— Matthew Thomas

“Illusions are crucial to the maintenance of life functions ...”

— Sheila Ballantyne

“The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.”

— Paul Kurtz

“In short, no association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People can't long tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her mistress, a teacher his pupil, a friend his friend nor a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a soldier his comrade nor a party-goer his companion, unless they sometimes have illusions about each other, make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly.”

— Desiderius Erasmus

“Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.”

— Allan Bloom

“Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses?”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

“Life is a process of losing our illusions, until we finally lose the illusion that we're alive.”

— Ashleigh Brilliant

“The master and the student on the journey to mastery, knows that the illusions are the illusions, decides why they are there, and then consciously creates what will be experienced next within the self through the illusions. When facing any life experience, there is a formula, a process, through which you may choose to move through mastery. Simply make the following statements: One, nothing in my world is real. Two, The meaning of everything is the meaning I give it. Three, I am who I say I am, and my experience is what I say it is. This is how to work with the illusions of life.”

— Neale Donald Walsch

“I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between "life" and "death"; between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity
and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.”

— Erich Fromm

“The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life led by human beings; the second was that human beings could survive a life in hotels.”

— John Irving

“Our goal while on this earth is to transcend our illusions and discover the innate power of our spirit. We are responsible for what we create, and we must therefore learn to act and think with love and wisdom and live in service to others and all life.”

— Caroline Myss

“Reason dissipates the illusions of life, but does not console us for their departure.”

— Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington