Quotes About Illusion

With that, the years slipped away, though not her beauty, because she had never had any.

Nada há definitivo no mundo; nem o infortúnio nem a prosperidade. O que a tua imaginação supõe estar perdido, acha-se apenas transviado ou oculto...

Tudo nos parece melhor e mais belo, — fruto da nossa ilusão, — e alegres com vermos o ano que desponta, não reparamos que ele é também um passo para a morte.

Enquanto os meses passam, faze de conta que estás no teatro, entre um ato e outro, conversando. Lá dentro preparam a cena, e os artistas mudam de roupa. Não vás lá; deixa que a dama, no camarim, ria com os seus amigos o que chorou cá fora com os espectadores. Quanto ao jardim que se está fazendo, não te exponhas a vê-lo pelas costas; é pura lona velha sem pintura, porque só a parte do espectador é que tem verdes flores

Creiam-me, o menos mau é recordar; ninguém se fie da felicidade presente; há nela uma gota da baba de Caim. Corrido o tempo e cessado o espasmo, então sim, então talvez se pode gozar deveras, porque entre uma e outra dessas duas ilusões, melhor é a que se gosta sem doer.

As andorinhas vinham agora em sentido contrário, ou não seriam as mesmas. Nós é que éramos os mesmos; ali ficámos, somando as nossas ilusões, os nossos temores, começando já a somar as nossas saudades.

He died shortly afterwards, at my house, swearing and always repeating that pain was an illusion, and that Pangloss, the slandered Pangloss, was not as foolish as Voltaire supposed.

It does not matter that we cannot fathom this mystery. The only real problem comes when we think that we have.

matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, and that time is a material substance.

Plato spoke of the necessity for divine madness in the poet. It is a frightening thing to open oneself to this strange and dark side of the divine; it means letting go of our sane self-control, that control which gives us the illusion of safety. But safety is only an illusion, and letting it go is part of listening to the silence, and to the Spirit.

We live under the illusion that if we can acquire complete control, we can understand God or we can write the great American novel.

but I still held my breath waiting for Brünnhilde to rise up out of the pyre at the end. And then, instead of a beautiful maiden emerging from the flames, there rose up a great fat

2. Men like women without make-up. They don't. They like extremely well and carefully made-up women whose skin has that expensive cultured look which comes from three hours at the dressing table. A woman who is really without make-up would frighten them to death. They regard blotches as eczema, and uneven colouring as a sign of tertiary syphilis.

One should always be defended against reality.

53. 'We mainly suppose the experiential quality to be an intrinsic quality of the physical object'-this is the so-called systematic illusion of color. Perhaps it is also that of love. But I am not willing to go there-not just yet. I believed in you.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.

The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.

They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act — and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment — are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.

The results from these experiments are, obviously, quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act—and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment—are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. But

In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.

The world - much as we want it to - does not accord with our intuition.

The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.