Lack Of Illusion Quotes & Sayings

No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Wilbur Larch knew that freedom was an orphan's most dangerous illusion, and when he finally heard from Homer, he scanned the oddly formal letter, which was disappointing in its lack of detail. Regarding illusions, and all the rest, there was simply no evidence.
'I am learning to swim,' wrote Homer Wells. (I know! I know! Tell me about it! Thought Wilbur Larch.) 'I do better at driving,' Homer added. — John Irving

The past is an illusion. You must learn to live in the present and accept yourself for what you are now. What you lack in flexibility and agility you must make up with knowledge and constant practice. — Bruce Lee

The illusion of purpose is to be avoided. The illuion of lack of purpose is to be avoided. — Frederick Lenz

I hate those endless descriptions of a heroine's physical attributes ... it really bothers me how in books it seems like the only two choices are perfection or self-hatred. As if readers will only like a character who's ideal
or completely shattered. — E. Lockhart

Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend ... when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present - love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure - the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

the most dangerous humans are the women who realize they don't need anyone after facing the hurricane alone — Gretchen Gomez

My love, my love, is a flame in the dark covered in glass. So glowingly beautiful to others on the outside, while slowly suffocating inside. — Anthony Liccione

... it only takes one tree to make
A thousand matches
Only takes one match to burn
A thousand trees. — Stereophonics

The Brazilian bikini wax is torture. To show a little appreciation, you could trim your nose hair. And your nut sack. — Kathryn Hahn

Even the illusion of love was preferable to the utter lack of it. — Courtney Milan

Reality is an illusion created by a lack of alcohol. — N. F. Simpson

Religion thrives on want and fear of the unknown, on lack of education. A frightened and confused human is fed by religious institutions with the illusion that the solution to his real problems is to appeal to the good will of an imaginary supernatural divinity religious institutions claim to represent. With one hand they offer a cup of rice and a pair of used shoes someone else has paid for. With the other, they place the Bible on the table, setting up the poor in spirit for the belief trap. — Paul Greene

The moral and medical lessons from this story are even more relevant today. Medicine is in the midst of a vast reorganization of fundamental principles. Most of our models of illness are hybrid models; past knowledge is mishmashed with present knowledge. These hybrid models produce the illusion of a systematic understanding of a disease - but the understanding is, in fact, incomplete. Everything seems to work spectacularly, until one planet begins to move backward on the horizon. We have invented many rules to understand normalcy - but we still lack a deeper, more unified understanding of physiology and pathology. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Life that did not yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing. — Jack London

What you do not know is greater
than what you know.
What you do not understand is greater
than what you understand.
What you have not achieved is greater
than what you have achieved. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Dying is a universe of its own. — Arlene Ang

Reality is an illusion that occurs due to the lack of alcohol. — W.C. Fields

The old legends of America belong quite as much to the blue-eyed little patriot as to the black-haired aborigine. And when they are grown tall like the wise grown-ups may they not lack interest in a further study of Indian folklore, a study which so strongly suggests our near kinship with the rest of humanity and points a steady finger toward the great brotherhood of mankind, and by which one is so forcibly impressed with the possible earnestness of life as seen through the teepee door! If it be true that much lies "in the eye of the beholder," then in the American aborigine as in any other race, sincerity of belief, though it were based upon mere optical illusion, demands a little respect.

After all he seems at heart much like other peoples. — Zitkala-Sa

The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams. — F Scott Fitzgerald

It is not the lack of wit or intellect that shallow men crave [in women], it is lack of personality; they desire a woman who will exist only as a shadow to themselves, because this gives them the illusion that they have some importance, that they are more than cattle. — Steven Brust

Perhaps," Oshima says, as if fed up. "Perhaps most people in the world aren't trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It's all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real bind. You'd better remember that. People actually prefer not being free." "Including you?" "Yeah. I prefer being unfree, too. Up to a point. Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it's true - all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. — Haruki Murakami

Man's proper stature is not one of mediocrity, failure, frustration, or defeat, but one of achievement, strength, and nobility. In short, man can and ought to be a hero. — Mike Mentzer

Courage, Love, Illusion (or dream, if you will)
he who possesses all three, or two, or at least one of these things wins whatever there is to win; those who lack all three are the failures. — Edward Lewis Wallant

Patience is the gift of possibility. Time is merely an illusion. People lack patience, which is why time becomes their enemy. — Lionel Suggs

She caught herself working so hard at mothering that she forgot to enjoy her children. -from ~Homecoming Season~ — Susan Wiggs

Xxx it is not lack of wit or intellect that shallow men crave, it is lack of personality; they desire a woman who will exist only as a shadow to themselves, because this gives them the illusion that they have some importance, that they are more than cattle. Personality is what distinguishes us from each other, what makes each man and woman unique, and to submerge one's personality is to make one's self interchangeable, like a mass-produced commodity; xxx — Steven Brust

Illusion is Reality's coy lover who cheers him when he is grim. Illusion is cunning to his wisdom of ages, weet oblivion to his knowledge. A bounty to his lack. [Sabine] — Kresley Cole

[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event. — Michel Foucault

He who desires less has less worries;
he who desires more has more worries. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Bouncing on beds, I remember from childhood, is a great depression reliever. — Robert M. Pirsig

Evil company is always to be shunned; because it leads to lust and anger, illusion, forgetfulness of the goal, destruction of the will (lack of perseverance), and destruction of everything. (Narada Bhakti Sutra) — Swami Vivekananda

Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective. — Siri Hustvedt

Empathy with someone else's pain or lack and a desire to help need to be balanced with a deeper realization of the eternal nature of all life and the illusion of all pain. Then let your peace flow into whatever you do, and you will be working on the levels of effect and cause simultaneously. — Eckhart Tolle

The problem isn't a shortage of opportunities; it's a lack of perspective. — Tim Fargo

But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there. — Knut Hamsun

I love dressing up. As kids, my friends and I would dress up as the Spice Girls - Posh Spice was my favourite because I had short brown hair like her. — Eliza Doolittle

There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory in and of itself, as a "work." Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter's head like Pallas Athena fully adorned in enchased armor. But that is only a pretense. No work has ever come into being that way. It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion-and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today. — Thomas Mann