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Illusions
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Published Monday, June 06, 2016 @ 7:04 AM EDT
Jun 06 2016

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
-Joseph Conrad

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
-Arthur Miller

And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.
-Ernest Hemingway

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
-Mark Twain

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
-Joseph Conrad

Fear best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.
-H.P. Lovecraft

Freedom from worries and surcease from strain are illusions that always inhabit the distance.
-Edwin Way Teale

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
-Virginia Woolf

History has no laws, and all patterns that we find there are useful illusions.
-Orson Scott Card

I believe that illusions are necessary to man, yet live without illusion; I believe that the passions are more profitable than reason, and yet no longer know what passion is.
-Nicolas Chamfort

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

I have had four happy days in my life, and three of them turned out to be illusions.
-Taylor Caldwell

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
-Virginia Woolf

In spite of ferocious differences of opinion about other moral issues, there seems to be something approaching consensus that it is cruel and malicious to interfere with the life-enhancing illusions of others- unless those illusions are themselves the cause of of even greater ills.
-Daniel Dennett

Life is full of obstacle illusions.
-Grant Frazier

Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
-Czeslaw Milosz

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions.
-Albert Einstein

Reason may cure illusions, but not suffering.
-Alfred de Musset

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is 'Thou shalt not question.'
-Sigmund Freud

Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions.
-Henry R. Luce

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
-Robert Lynd

The biggest lesson you can learn in life, or teach your children, is that life is not castles in the skies, happily ever after. The biggest lesson we have to give our children is truth. And that's what I'm saying: that we're all built with illusions. And they break.
-Goldie Hawn

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

The worst thing about depression isn't the sense that you're accentuating the negative, it's that you're seeing things the way they really are, stripped of the illusions you use every day to divert yourself from the Yawning Maw of Futility. It's the wind that blows off the snow and reveals the stone.
-James Lileks

We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
-Bill Hicks

We have built illusions round us and see no way out of the glass forest.
-Brian Aldiss

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.
-Daniel J. Boorstin

When one has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


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