Quotes About Illusion

Those who praise the illusion of assimilation should be reminded that… "The privilege of assimilation is that you are left alone. But assimilation should not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed and your model minority qualifications that helped you in the past, can be used against you, since you are no longer invisible.

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst. It is not as if, had you asked me, I would have claimed to fathom the thoughts and sentiments of two whose station in life was so far distant from mine. But in my own unexamined way I had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to.

had believed that, working in their house and seeing to their needs, watching their comings and goings and their dealings with others, I had come to know them. How little, how very little, that knowledge had really amounted to.

Still, he could see how a man like Scott might get confused at a place like the Meadows. Life looked well enough there. It was what you couldn't see that rubbed your soul raw.

Oh how wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying

Life is but a dream for the dead.

Because these calculations generate precise numbers for an uncertain risk, they produce an illusory certainty.

plans." To be sure, illusions have their function. Small children often need security blankets to soothe their fears. Yet for the mature adult, a high need for certainty can be a dangerous thing. It prevents us from learning to face the uncertainty pervading our lives. As hard as we try, we cannot make our lives risk-free the way we make our milk fat-free.

Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.

Fredric Drum hadde definitivt ristet av seg de siste rester av godtroenhet og mildhet overfor det bedrageriske skinn som kaltes «tilfeldigheter».

An English wood is like a good many other things in life-- very promising at a distance, but a hollow mockery when you get within. You see daylight on both sides, and the sun freckles the very bracken. Our woods need the night to make them seem what they ought to be--what they once were, before our ancestors' descendants demanded so much more money, in these so much more various days. ("The Striding Place")

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

Whenever you get there, there is no there there.

Rest forever, tired heart. The final illusion has perished. The one we believed eternal is gone. Just like that. Out the door desire follows hope. Rest forever. Enough throbbing. Nothing deserves your attention nor is the earth worth a sigh. Bitterness and boredom is life, nothing else ever, and the world is mud. Quiet now. Despair for the last time. Fate gives us dying as a gift. Now turn from the hills, the ugly hidden power which rules for the common evil and the infinite vanity of it all.

Reason is the enemy of all greatness: reason is the enemy of nature: nature is great, reason is small. I mean that it will be more or less difficult for a man to be great the more he is governed by reason, that few can be great (and in art and poetry perhaps no one) unless they are governed by illusions.

Diceva che i diletti più veri che abbia la nostra vita, sono quelli che nascono dalle immaginazioni false; e che i fanciulli trovano il tutto anche nel niente, gli uomini il niente nel tutto. ( Detti memorabili di Filippo Ottonieri )

may be known, but is in no way felt" (Z 1099) and the youthful illusions (l'inganno giovanile) that survive into old age (

Chi ha viaggiato, gode questo vantaggio, che le rimembranze che le sue sensazioni gli destano, sono spessissimo di cose lontane, e però tanto più vaghe, suscettibili di fare illusione, e poetiche.

poets today have no other readers but persons who are educated and informed," but unfortunately "[t]oday every educated and informed man is unfailingly egoistic and philosophical, deprived of every noteworthy illusion, devoid of intense passions, and every woman likewise" (Z 2944–45).

The one real woman you want just doesn't exist. She's a dream you have to live with. Reaching, reaching, reaching - but never touching.

All the dreams you show up in are not your own.

like a swan and its reflection on the surface of a lake.

Things of a day! what are we and what not? A dream of a shaddow is man; yet when some god-given splendor falls, a glory of light comes over him and his life is sweet

On retarde une échéance, on se croit capable de gérer la fuite, jusqu'au jour où une main nous saisit par le collet et nous ramène à la case départ. Je suis de plus en plus convaincu que nous ne gouvernons que partiellement nos petites vies