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.
Categories: Illusions, Quotes on a topic
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