Quotes About Illusion

Musicians speak of bliss, but that's just to throw the uninitiated off the scent. There is no bliss; there is only control.

when you spend all your hours with horses, your soul expands a bit until the ways of men reveal themselves to be no more than a costume party you'd be well advised not to take at face value.

The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: the problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!

Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for "false evidence appearing real.

The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.

It is the egoic illusion of our own perfect rightness that often allows us to crucify others.

A heaven you created by yourself will never be heaven for long.

They look like the oppressors, but have no doubt they are really the oppressed.

Any time you surrender a negative, accusatory, compulsive, or self-serving thought, word, or behavior, the Buddhists describe this as "dying"! Power, self-image, and control do not give up without a fight, and this is first of all true inside of our minds, where the illusions begin.

Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.

The juniors are made to think that the container is all there is and all they should expect; or worse, that they are mature and home free because they believe a few right things or perform some right rituals.

pride. If there's too much "I know," it will lead to illusion and ignorance. Isn't that ironic? Jesus says, "The person who says 'I know,' is precisely the blind one" (John 9:41).

We have to accept that human culture is in a mass hypnotic trance. We're sleepwalkers.

So many of us accept either a successful or a negative self-image inside of a system of false images to begin with!

One of the major problems in the spiritual life is our attachment to our own self-image—either positively or negatively created. We have to begin with some kind of identity, but the trouble is that we confuse this idea of ourselves with who we actually are in God. Ideas about things are not the things in themselves. We all have to start by forming a self-image, but the problem is our attachment to it, our need to promote it and protect it and have others like it. What a trap!

if making things seem prettier than they are is a lie, then making them seem uglier must be another.

What an absolute folly love was. Talk about a flawed concept.

there would be no surprises, and the Jacuzzi was just a big bathtub with a few extra jets of water, loud enough that it could cover over just about any cries of despair. ???? (Posted 9/8/2012)

Hope is a lie that becomes true

Humans see what they want to see.

Gaea?" Leo shook his head. "Isn't that Mother Nature? She's supposed to have, like, flowers in her hair and birds singing around her and dear and rabbits doing her laundry." "Leo, that's Snow White," Piper said.

Akhlys lunged at Percy, and for a split second he thought: Well, hey, I'm just smoke. She can't touch me, right? He imagined the Fates up in Olympus, laughing at his wishful thinking: LOL, NOOB!

Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards.