Life Is Just An Illusion Quotes & Sayings

Finding Grant however and living happily ever after was an illusion, a dream. Things like that didn't happen to women like them. Things like that didn't happen in real life. Real life was shacking up with a man you didn't love just to have the security of a roof over your head.
Elle Ison — Shawn Reilly

Photography seems to fix, but this is an illusion created by our short lives. A photograph is merely a note held for 200 years. — Douglas McCulloh

We all know that rainbows are temporary optical illusions based on the factors of sunlight, moisture, and heat. The environment creates each rainbow like the mind creates a self. Both creations are relatively real, in that we can genuinely experience them temporarily; but just as the factors that created the illusion (whether rainbow or self) arose, so will they also pass. There is no permanent self; there is no permanent rainbow. It is not true to say that there is no self at all or that everything is empty or illusory, but it is true that everything is constantly changing and that there is no solid, permanent, unchanging self within the process that is life. Everything and everyone is an unfolding process. — Noah Levine

I'm going to tell you something that no magazine or novel or television show will ever let on. Love wears you down. We think of it as hearts and flowers and happily ever after but in real life, the things you have to do in the name of love kill you ... You end up doing a thousand things in a day in the name of love that you wouldn't ask a dog to do.
Sex is the most powerful weapon in your arsenal
innocence is attractive in children, but it makes brittle, disappointed adults.
Someone liking you is just the beginning; it always starts nicely but before you know it it's like Persephone being dragged into the Underworld.
Romantic love is an illusion Hughie,. It can be manupulated, twisted, piled up like a bunch of fun-house mirrors. The very nature of it is deceptive. It promises closeness but the only thing is ever really reveals is the dreams and fears of the person with the obsessions. That's why it's so easy to control — Kathleen Tessaro

Am I an illusion? — Debasish Mridha

The place of horror turns out to be no more than a green scoop, sometimes shadowed, sometimes shining with the bilberries and grass within it, as if a mouth had opened from which streamed a beam of light. So my uncle Robert's death, which had looked from a distance to be an all-consuming tragedy was, close-up, the story of a man finding release from his pain and how his brother had showed such defiant love. The past was a grave, a trap - and yet, also neither of these. Just light, coming and going.
At the wolf pit you imagine you will stare into a hole littered with bones, but what draws you to that place is not what you take from it. The wolf pit seems a delicate illusion. You walk towards it; there is nothing, just a curve of the moor; then it is a soft green light, and then it is nothing again. — Will Cohu

And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seeing nothing, roaring on at last to the capture of the solar system, only to find the sun cockney and the stars suburban. — G.K. Chesterton

The body, whether it be human, mammal or insect, is nothing more than a machine designed as a vehicle intended to be used by the "soul." The brain, is perfected engineering inspired by divinity. Therefore, the world we see and touch is just an illusion because life and death are one in the same; essentially, we are heaven, eternal and ever lasting. — Alejandro C. Estrada

One will never find in the waterfall of sights anything else than the Illusion of Life, which falls in torrents on the granite rocks of the souls. — Sorin Cerin

Isaac's humility did not discriminate between man and man and scarcely between man and watch. In his thought men were much like their watches. The passage of time was marked as clearly upon a man's face as upon that of his watch and the marvelous mechanism of his body could be as cruelly disturbed by evil hazards. The outer case varied, gunmetal or gold, carter's corduroy or bishop's broadcloth, but the tick of the pulse was the same, the beating of life that gave such a heartbreaking illusion of eternity. — Elizabeth Goudge

Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea. — Henri Frederic Amiel

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Believing in what you don't know is as true as believing in what you know as long as your life is just an illusion. — Sorin Cerin

A good way to test the Truth in relationships is to behave the way the other person does for a while, maybe in person or by letter. If the friend is True they will behave True to themselves. If on the other hand this "friend" has been using you on an energetic level to "get you" to fulfil their needs or to dump their responsibilities. Well, then they were unreal, not a friend at all, just a fiction. Just an illusion and a lesson to be learned and thankful for. Everything you experience in life can be used for your betterment as a human being, to enable you to be Truly you. Not some false gathering and bundle of words, borrowed beliefs, thoughtforms and false actions. — A. Antares

In this life struggle, here I am among you fully cognizant that a true believer has no fear of what God has ordained for him. Those who are visited by fear live only for their present, under the illusion that the world began with them and will end with their departure. — King Hussein I

Miracles are statistical improbabilities. And fate is an illusion humanity uses to comfort itself in the dark. There are no absolutes in life, save death. — Amie Kaufman

The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves - or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn. — Sophie Scholl

The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters. meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision. — Anais Nin

People loved to think they were getting a deal. Four times out of five they would look right past what they didn't want to see. — Donna Tartt

Everybody needs to show respect to each others' ways and the cultural life that you get on this planet. Don't get caught up on 'I'm brown, black, white, red, blue, whatever.' You gotta ask, what were you called before 1492? All these names we're using now are just an illusion made to keep us fighting each other. — Afrika Bambaataa

Love is a dangerous thing. It comes in disguise to change our life ... Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination. Love is a voyage too, a voyage with no destination except death, but a voyage of bliss. — Bernard Cornwell

Real peace comes only when you stop chasing it. When you relax your driving desire for comfort, real fulfillment arises. When you drop your hectic pursuit of gratification, the real beauty of life comes out. When you seek to know the reality without illusion, complete with all its pain and danger, that is when real freedfom and security are yours. — Henepola Gunaratana

Like the body craves oxygen, the mind is desperate for certainty. It believes that without a safe foothold on reality, it will die.
But the fascinating thing is that the illusion of certainty is exactly the opposite of safety because it hardens and narrows the vision to make everything fit its own scope. Then when new information arrives which would be its ally, the mind pushes it away in favor of the leaky life raft to which it clings, sinking all the while beneath the waves of change.
In fact, the only antidote for this is to embrace 'I don't know' so deeply that a powerful, dynamic safety emerges. This is like learning to surf so well that a tsunami wave shows up as a challenge to test our mastery. — Jacob Nordby

Thus I do think that the challenge is to recognize that the purpose for which we are gathered is to encounter each other as an asceticism and thereby to recognize that the 'other' is present to disabuse me of illusion. Whether the 'other' is that sister in the house who drives me nuts just because she exists or whether the 'other' is the Chapter of the sisters taking the vote or the 'other' is the prioress acting in virtue of her office to make a decision, the other is there to disabuse me of illusion; even when the 'other' makes a mistake! The fact of the other's mistake is still there to show me that I am not God, that I do not have the control over life to simply prevent all errors. — Walter Wagner

Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive. — Paul Scott

film is and has always been just a subset of animation - in contrast to how critics presented the relation - if animation is understood to be the inputting of life, or the inputting of the illusion of life, into that which is flat or inert or a model or an image. — Karen Beckman

For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it. Old One, do we not? For ever and ever ... so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time. — Susan Cooper

We have been cut off from our souls in the West, and because romantic love has become our religion, we think we can find fulfillment through this extraordinary and powerful force that draws us into an illusion of permanence. Passion makes us feel alive, makes us sing, makes us feel in touch with something powerful and wonderful, just as it would if we followed this meaning in life in a more spiritual practice. In the West it is often through such relationships, through another human being, that we search desperately for something, not knowing it is to be found within ourselves. — Sarah Bartlett

I used to think things were the way they are for a reason, that there was some hidden meaning. I used to think that this meaning governed the way the world was. But it's an illusion to think that there are good and bad reasons. Grammar is a lie to make us think that what we say is connected by a logic that you'll find if you study it, a lie that gone on for centuries. Because I now know that life just lurches between stability and instability and doesn't obey any law. — Delphine De Vigan

As you look for solutions, seek for wholeness. The bridge to wholeness is an increasingly broader perspective and an increasingly greater inclusion of life. The world of structure would have you believe that reality is that which is permanent and illusion is that which is changeable. It would have you believe that when a thing is changeable, it is just illusion. If it is permanent, then it is real. Anything is real that is composed of love, spirit, and adamantine particles. These three aspects of reality can be shaped and reshaped in infinite ways or perceived from infinite directions without diminishing their reality. Life is a veritable river of fluid possibilities. — Glenda Green

Love? I always thought love was just something that ate away your sanity, left you with an inferiority complex, and filled you with jealousy...and bitterness.
Noi-chan told me all about love... and now I know the truth.
Love is an illusion. Nothing more than that.
Anyway, it has nothing to do with me.
So many people get hung up on love while life passes them by. — Tomoko Hayakawa

What we see on the TV screen, or the film screen or what we listen to in music, we have an illusion of what Prince Charming looks like or Cinderella's gonna look like in our life and we forget about what true love really means. — Shari Wiedmann

In my Future of an Illusion I was concerned [ ... ] with what the ordinary man understands by his religion, that system of doctrines and pledges that on the one hand explains the riddle of this world to him with an enviable completeness, and on the other assures him that a solicitous Providence is watching over him and will make up to him in a future existence for any shortcomings in this life. The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other from but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud

Not knowing whom to fall in love with is like not knowing which film to make next. Life is pretty chaotic; it's just an illusion that one has control over one's life. — Shekhar Kapur

Some people center the universe around themselves; while making other people nothing but decorations to their existence. "I will do this and then I will do that and then people will think this about me and then people will think that about me, and then I will add that person to my life when the convenient time arrives, and this person over here would make a very convenient addition as well ... " They build their own thrones for themselves, and add decorations all around their thrones. The problem with that is: it does not bring happiness. A throne must be built for you; it must not be you who builds your own throne. If so, everything that you think you are is only an illusion! And illusions dissolve one day. Poof! — C. JoyBell C.

Most people's reality is an illusion, a great big illusion. You automatically have to succumb to the illusion that 'I am this body'. I am not George. I am not really George. I am this living thing that goes on, always has been, always will be, but at
this time I happen to be in 'this' body. The body has changed; was a baby, was a young man, will
soon be an old man, and I'll be dead. The
physical body will pass but this bit in the middle,
that's the only reality. All the rest is the illusion,
so to say that somebody thinks we are, the ex-
Beatles are removed from reality in their personal concept. It does not have any truth to it just because somebody thinks it. They are the concepts which become layer upon layer of illusion. Why live in the darkness all your life? Why, if you are unhappy, if you are having a miserable time, why not just look at it. Why are you in the darkness? Look for the light. The light is within. That is the big message — George Harrison

If you care so much about it," she asks him, "then why did you run?"
He takes a moment before answering, shifting his weight and grimacing again. "Their work is good," he says. "It just isn't mine."
This baffles her. His motives - his hazy integrity. It was easy to dismiss Lev as "part of the problem" when she did not know him, but now it's not so easy. He's a paradox. This is a boy who almost blew himself to bits in an attempt to kill others, and yet he offered himself to the parts pirate in order to save Miracolina's life. How could someone go from having no respect for one's own existence to being willing to give himself as a sacrifice for someone he barely knows? It flies in the face of the truths that have defined Miracolina's life. The bad are bad, the good are good, and being caught in between is just an illusion. There is no gray. — Neal Shusterman

Consciousness is the screen. The images on the screen are your perceptions, the illusion that life is solid, that there is a material universe. — Frederick Lenz

We have a fictional "I" that we try to love and protect. We spend most of our life playing this futile game. "What will happen? How will it go? Will I get something out of it?" I, I, I - it's a mind game of illusion, and we are lost in it. — Charlotte Joko Beck

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others. — Lisa Unger

Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could. — Lynda Barry

My friends, I tell you repeatedly that the illusion that Life creates is very, very intelligent. The illusion itself is intelligent! Just understand how intelligent the intelligence must be in order to create an intelligent illusion. The intelligent illusion is so intelligent it will appear real to man every moment of his daily life! — Rajneesh

Many Sages have said, "Your world is a dream. You're living in an illusion." They're referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality. When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. — Adyashanti

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing. — Wallace Stegner

Illusions are crucial to the maintenance of life functions ... — Sheila Ballantyne

Possible Ending #16 (Life Imitates Art Imitates Life Imitates Art Imitates): I'd seen this movie. Obvious ending: outright betrayal, lesson learned, life is heartbreak, people who mean well still fuck you over, everyone's sad, greedy, looking out for number one, no consideration for the fragile fat boy whose displayed cynicism only masks a deeper hope that everyone's okay, will ultimately end up all right, that love exists, that happiness may not be stable but at least comes in bursts, that everything worthwhile wasn't just a self-created illusion. — Adam Wilson

One comes back [reborn] as a son because of harmony with us [from the past life] and one comes back as a son also because of enmity [vengeance from the past life], [but] needlessly arises the illusion [wrong belief] that 'they are mine...they are mine'. — Dada Bhagwan

For years, i lived my life, waiting for the other shoe to drop ... i thought control was something i could have over my life. My goal was to live life, in such a way, that i would never again have to suffer any form of trauma or abuse that would remind me of my painful past. I was living life on a tightrope of tension. I was only happy when things went smoothly and came apart at the seams when i was thrown a curveball.
NOW, i realize, that the key to happiness is surrendering to the illusion of control. And to trust that, no matter what happens to me, i have the infinite inner-wisdom and strength to find my way through. — Jaeda DeWalt

The world of shapes, lines, curves, and solids is as varied as the world of numbers, and it is only our long-satisfied possession of Euclidean geometry that offers us the impression, or the illusion, that it has, that world, already been encompassed in a manageable intellectual structure. The lineaments of that structure are well known: as in the rest of life, something is given and something is gotten; but the logic behind those lineaments is apt to pass unnoticed, and it is the logic that controls the system. — David Berlinski

Illusion doesn't mean that something is not real. Illusion simply means that something is less real than something else. This life and this world certainly exist - who is to say the reality of the dream is not real? — Frederick Lenz

For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people - a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance. - William Longgood, The Queen Must Die — Susan Wiggs

Look at me
I am the life in a wasteland
Look at me
I am the slavery through the ages
Look at me
I am the mirror of the world
Look at me
I am the illusion I've fought for
Look at me
I'm still loving you
and I keep being here
for you, for me,
and for what's worth breathing — Rixa White

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. — Andre Breton

It's easy to operate under the illusion that what we are doing is so important we cannot stop doing it ... Stopping is a spiritual act. It is the refuge where we drink life in. — Sue Monk Kidd

Just because some dreams never see light that doesn't make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn's but trust me the illusion is worse. — Parul Wadhwa

Perfection is an illusion which often prevents us from accepting the realities of life. — Sandeep Sharma

Human life is designed as a self-study program.
Existence is always one undivided. It is what we often call the Light. It is a pure consciousness of unconditional love. Out of the Light the idea of darkness is created. There is no existence of light and darkness, as separated energies. The separation is illusionary.
Experiencing ourselves as humans is an exploration of the greater Self in a localised condition.
A dense reality is created to facilitate the idea of forgetfulness.
Now we collectively entered a new time of remembering. It is not necessary anymore to create the illusion of self-disconnection from the energy source. — Raphael Zernoff

Mastering our thoughts can only be achieved after we truly understand what reality is. Thus, it is time to shatter your pre-conceived concept of reality. First, the majority of what you perceive as reality exists only in your mind, and, chances are, you spend most hours of your life in this illusion. — Alaric Hutchinson

As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other's activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion. — Leo Tolstoy

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion. — George Bernard Shaw

A life that is truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual. — Marion Woodman

When I look over my past, I see that the stages in my life are like the phases of the moon. I've had periods where I was the waxing gibbous: fat with wealth and success. There have been other seasons when my happiness was like the waning crescent and I watched my joy fade away slowly, merging with the atmosphere around me as if it never existed. Then I felt as if I was left with nothing more than an illusion, but happiness returns in time and glows once more in corpulent fullness. It's time that makes the difference. — Amy Neftzger

The first time Raffaele ever saw Adelina, it was a stormy-wracked night that changed her life and, indeed, the world. He recalls looking down from the window in his Dalia lodging to see a girl with silver-bright hair, conjuring an illusion of darkness such that he had never seen. He remembers the day she first came to his chambers in Estenzia, when Enzo was still alive and she was still innocent, and the way she looked up at him with her uncertain, damaged gaze. He remembers her test, and what he said to Enzo that night. How long ago that had been. How he had judged her wrongly. — Marie Lu

There is indeed a great deal of futility amongst the human race which we do not commonly see, for it all forms part of our illusion; but let a man be much annoyed by something that others do, so that he is separated from them and has to leave them, and looks back at what they are doing, and he'll see at once all manner of whimsical absurdities that he had not noticed before; and Ramon Alonzo in the shade of his oak, waiting for the noon to go by, grew very contemptuous of the attitude that the world took up towards shadows. — Lord Dunsany

Truth hides behind the curtain of illusion. We often get lost in illusion and forget to find the truth. — Debasish Mridha

Life is haphazard. We plan, and then we deal when the plans go awry. Control is an illusion; best intentions are the best we can do. — Anna Quindlen

Life isn't all perpetual bliss, nor is it one woeful weeping session. But you can concentrate so hard on noticing moments of one or the other that either a bright outlook or dim expectations becomes your regular illusion. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Till we attain immortality, all life will remain just an illusion! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Carrying The Beatles' or the Sixties' dream around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That's not to say you can't enjoy Glenn Miller or The Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone. It's not living now. It's an illusion. — John Lennon

You have to see and meet God in this life.
Don't let this life go by and miss discovering the Supreme One.
You will find him inside as your constant being.
Pray: Holy mother, holy father, holy spirit,
don't give me the illusion that even one second belongs to me.
All is you. I, also, am you and yours.
For only like this does your life stand the chance to be miraculous. — Mooji

We get swallowed up by the illusion that unless we can find a place to belong, we are going to be all alone in the world. — Naoki Higashida

There are two paths of which one may choose in the walk of life; one we are born with, and the one we consciously blaze. One is naturally true, while the other is a perceptive illusion. Choose wisely at each fork in the road. — T.F. Hodge

To lose awareness of what is helpful or harmful in the worldly life is moh (Illusory vision & attachment). — Dada Bhagwan

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one. — Brad Bird