Illusion Quotes
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We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.
Karl Hess
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It is not true that the heart wears out - but the body creates this illusion.
Albert Camus
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Love is substance; Lust, illusion. Only in the surge of passion do the two mingle in confusion.
Calvin Miller
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Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.
Blaise Pascal
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Even the illusion of love was preferable to the utter lack of it.
Courtney Milan
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As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.
Terence McKenna
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There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.
George Washington
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I had no illusions about love anymore. It came, it went, it left casualties or it didn't. People weren't meant to be together forever, regardless of what the songs say.
Sarah Dessen
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith
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The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to insist in enjoying everything. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands, and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple.
Eugene Delacroix
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On some level we trade passion for security, that's trading one illusion for another. It's a matter of degree. We can't live in constant fear, but we can't live without any. The fear of loss is essential to love.
Esther Perel
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Suffering is an illusion.
Gautama Buddha
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The greatest deterrent to giving is the illusion that this earth is our home.
Randy Alcorn
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You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.
Terence McKenna
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Either Christianity is true or it's false. If you bet that it's true, and you believe in God and submit to Him, then if it IS true, you've gained God, heaven, and everything else. If it's false, you've lost nothing, but you've had a good life marked by peace and the illusion that ultimately, everything makes sense. If you bet that Christianity is not true, and it's false, you've lost nothing. But if you bet that it's false, and it turns out to be true, you've lost everything and you get to spend eternity in hell.
Blaise Pascal
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Suppose you try to convince someone, even if only yourself, that change is an illusion. You work your way through each step until you or your listener is convinced. Yet that your mind entertains one premise after the other and finally reaches the conclusion is itself an instance o f the change the argument denies.
Edward Feser
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Writing to you like this makes me feel that you are still alive. It’s an illusion I’ve noticed before—words on a page are like oxygen to a petrol engine, firing up ghosts. It lasts only while the words are in your head. After you put down the paper or the pen, the pistons fall lifeless again.
Elizabeth Wein
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We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.
Walter Brueggemann
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Illusion is the dust the devil throws in the eyes of the foolish.
Minna Antrim
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This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.
Dana Gioia
