Love Illusions Quotes & Sayings

It's only when you become love - in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments - that you will "know." As you identify less and less with the "me," you will be more at ease with everybody and with everything. — Anthony De Mello

That gospel message should both humble and lift the believer up at the same time. It teaches us that we are indeed self-centered sinners. It perforates our illusions about our goodness and superiority. But the gospel also fills us with more love and affirmation than we could ever imagine. It means we don't need to earn our self-worth through incessant service and work. It means also that we don't mind so much when we are deprived of some comfort, compliment, or reward. We don't have to keep records and accounts anymore. We can freely give and freely receive. — Timothy Keller

At the transpersonal level, we begin to love others not because they love us, affirm us, reflect us, or secure us in our illusions, but because they are us. Christ's primary teaching does not mean, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself," but "Love your neighbor as your Self." And not just your neighbor, but your whole environment. You begin to care for your surroundings just as you would your own arms and legs. At this level, remember, your relationship to your environment is the same as your relationship to your very own organism. At — Ken Wilber

Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but refuse. They cling to the realm, or love, or the gods ... illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is. But they'll never know this. Not until it's too late. — George R R Martin

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things. — Lorrie Moore

Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control. We can love and care for others but we cannot possess our children, lovers, family, or friends. We can assist them, pray for them, and wish them well, yet in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their thoughts and actions, not on our wishes. — Jack Kornfield

You'll join me sooner than you know in a place with ... no illusions, where the truth is the only architecture, the only color, the only sound
where that which we sense merely on occasion, and which takes us up and gives us the rare and beautiful glimpses of the things we truly love, flows in deep rivers and tumbles about like clouds in the sky. — Mark Helprin

Yes, all my illusions will burn into illumination of joy, and all my desires ripen into fruits of love. — Rabindranath Tagore

She'd lost so much in the process of becoming Zyne, but somewhere in the middle of it all, she'd found herself. Her heritage had shattered her illusions of a tranquil life. Destiny swept behind in a blaze, decimating everything she tried to hold on to. She was left alone, like the solitary tree standing after a forest fire. She'd thought she would crumble to ash, just another memory on the wind. But as blackened pieces of her cracked and fell away, she saw the truth. Under all that charred wreckage was the heartwood. Bruised. Scarred. But still good. Still capable of growth. When she looked in the mirror, she no longer saw a victim, but a survivor. — Gwen Mitchell

Who can remember the pangs and sweetness of those early years? We remember our first real love no more clearly than the illusions that caused us to rave during a high fever. — Stephen King

Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste. — Tim O'Brien

With me, illusions are bound to be shattered. I am here to shatter all illusions. Yes, it will irritate you, it will annoy you - that's my way of functioning and working. I will sabotage you from your very roots! Unless you are totally destroyed as a mind, there is no hope for you. — Osho

Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself. — Rick Yancey

The wave came again and carried them out onto the sea of pain, where he wondered again why life ever came into the world...The tide that drew them out into the troubled waters once again spent itself, and they floated slowly back, resting for a minute or so, only to be dragged out again. He held her up while she contracted and pushed inside herself, trying to open the petals of her flowering body...He lifted her, trying to free the load she was struggling with, but she was straining against the traces, getting nowhere, her eyes like those of a draft horse...Who would choose this, thought Laski, this work, this woe? Life enslaves us, makes us want children, gives us a thousand illusions about love, and all so that it can go forward. — William Kotzwinkle

Allied to this question is the kindred question on which we so often hear an innocent British boast
the fact that our statesmen are privately on very friendly relations, although in Parliament they sit on opposite sides of the House. Here, again, it is as well to have no illusions. Our statesmen are not monsters of mystical generosity or insane logic, who are really able to hate a man from three to twelve and to love him from twelve to three ... If our statesmen agree more in private, it is for the very simple reason that they agree more in public. And the reason they agree so much in both cases is really that they belong to one social class; and therefore the dining life is the real life. Tory and Liberal statesmen like each other, but it is not because they are both expansive; it is because they are both exclusive. — G.K. Chesterton

It isn't yours nor his nor the Pope's hell that we are all going to: it's my mother's and her mother's and father's and their mother's and father's hell, and it isn't you who are going there, but we, the three - no: four of us. And so at least we will all be together where we belong, since even if only he went there we would still have to be there too since the three of us are just illusions that he begot, and your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory And we will all be together in torment and so we will not need to remember love and fornication, and maybe in torment you cannot even remember why you are there. And if we cannot remember all this, it cant be much torment. — William Faulkner

We all need illusions. That's why we love movies. — Monica Bellucci

When people of different religions or countries harm people as a means to create peace, it's out of the compulsion to make all colors the same. This is also why people think that war is a logical avenue towards creating peace. People who do not have or know inner peace perpetuate these shards of illusions. Thus, they are projecting their fragmented concepts of peace out onto the world. — Alaric Hutchinson

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. — Terry Eagleton

Like a child at the cinema, we get caught up in the illusion. From this comes all of our vanity, ambition, and insecurity. We fall in love with the illusions we have created and develop excessive pride in our appearance, our possessions, and our accomplishments. It's like wearing a mask and proudly thinking that the mask is really you. — Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

Your ability to comprehend your environment is very strongly defined by your belief in a number of illusions. Time. Truth. Love. — Jim Butcher

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

This kind of anarchic, Dionysian love doesn't give a shit about commitments or institutions; it smashes our illusions about what kind of people we are, what we would and would not do, exposing the difference between what we want to want and what we really want. We may choose friendships based on common interests and complimentary qualities, but our reasons for falling in love are altogether more irrational, projections of our most infantile wants and pathology. — Tim Kreider

Sometimes love is nothing more than a sticky web; illusions spun from clever minds and bitter hearts. — Nicole Lyons

You know, when I was in love, I was always inventing things. A whole array of tricks, illusions and optical effects to amuse my lady friend. I think she'd had enough of my inventions by the end ... I wanted to create a voyage to the moon just for her, but what I should have given her was a real journey on earth. — Mathias Malzieu

We lost not only through death, but also by leaving and being left, by changing and letting go and moving on. And our losses include not only our separations and departures from those we love, but our conscious and unconscious losses of romantic dreams, impossible expectations, illusions of freedom and power, illusions of safety
and the loss of our own younger self, the self that thought it would always be unwrinkled and invulnerable and immortal. — Judith Viorst

Why is that I never get cut off from pity, sympathy, participation, in spite of the fact that I am living out of my own dream, my interior vision, my fantasies without any interruptions. I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, have nightmares, write in my head, compose, decompose, improvise, invent, I listen to all, I hear all that is said, I feel Spain, I am aware, I am everywhere , I am open to wounds, open to love, I am rooted to my devotions, I am never separete, I am never cut off, never blind, deaf, absent. I hold on to the dream which makes life possible, to the creation which transfigures, to the God who sustains, to the crimes which gave life, to the illusions which makes the marvelous possible. I hold on to the poetry and the human simplicities. — Anais Nin

Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. "The motives which predominate most human affairs," he said, "are self-love and self-interest." The common people, like the common soldiers in his army, could not be expected to be "influenced by any other principles than those of interest. — Gordon S. Wood

I do not pursue yesterday's wishes, for you are true. No illusions can illustrate your illustrious truth. My Queen, just look at you. — Delano Johnson

Words entangle. But if one can understand the whole significance of the ways of one's thought, the ways of our desires and their pursuits and ambitions, then there is a possibility of having or understanding that which is love. But that requires an extraordinary understanding of oneself.

[...]

Love is not a sentiment, not romanticism, not dependent on something, and that state is extremely arduous and difficult to understand, or to be in - because our minds are always interfering, limiting, encroaching upon its functioning. Therefore it is important to understand first the mind and its ways; otherwise we shall be caught in illusions, caught in words and sensations that have very little significance. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The truth of who we are dissolves the illusions when they arise, simply by us not buying into them anymore. By realizing they were counterfeit bliss. By and by, oneness dissolves what was once separation. — Tehya Sky

Soon as you realize you're immortal," he said, "declare the power of Love even when it seems invisible, you'll go far beyond the illusions of space and time. In all history, the one power you never lose is your power of letting go of space and time, the joy of dying that is no wicked thing, it comes in love, to everyone. — Richard Bach

She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. — Oscar Wilde

It's fear of the unknown. The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that-it's all illusion. Unknown is what it is. Accept that it's unknown and it's plain sailing. Everything is unknown-then you're ahead of the game. That's what it is. Right? — John Lennon

I do not wish to grow old, to outlive my illusions. Only a short respite from cares and sorrow, a brief time of flowers, and music, and love, and laughter, and ecstatic tears. — Anne Reeve Aldrich

Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary, they were for the taking. — Mark Helprin

What do you think you'll do, Abel?" Abel walked slowly over to Silvestre and said: "Something very simple: I'm going to live. I will leave your home feeling much more confident than when I entered it. Not because the path you showed me was the right one for me, but because you made me realize that I need to find my own path. It will take time, though ... " "Yours will always be the path of pessimism." "Probably, but I want my pessimism to keep me safe from facile, comforting illusions
like love." Silvestre gripped him by the shoulders and shook him: "But Abel, anything that isn't built on love will only generate hate!" "You're right, my friend, but perhaps that's how it will have to be for a long time yet. The day when we can build on love has still now arrived. — Jose Saramago

Without illusions. I love you because you are
fallible and because your poor misguided testosterone-corrupted brain has you doing cartwheels
trying not to be. I love you because of all you are and because of all you're not. And because, no
matter what, you are all the man I'll ever need. — Cindy Gerard

We'd had to find each other to finally understand that love could not be controlled. Predictions, assumptions, and absolutes were illusions. My love for him was volatile, uncontrollable, and overpowering, but ... that was love. Love was real. — Jamie McGuire

I don't believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening. — Elena Ferrante

Guilt - the universal punishment. For what? What have you done? Illusions of deeds gone wrong, misspoken words, actions that seemed to kill or harm others, all are dreams of injuries to ourselves and others, and yet they are only dreams. The spirit realm, where all the loved ones wait, is a much more accurate portrayal of yourself. Yet even this is incomplete. You are ultimately only love, extending itself for all of eternity. — Shaman Elizabeth Herrera

And Peter Lake knew that these things were nothing in themselves but the means by which to remember those he had loved, and to remind him that the power of the love he had known was repeated a million times a million times over, from one soul to another--all worthy, all holy, none ever lost. He glided through the illusions that flashed bravely on the smoke, and he was touched very deeply by the will of things to live in the light. — Mark Helprin

There is only one passion which satisfies man's need to unite himself with the world, and to acquire at the same time a sense of integrity and individuality, and this is love. Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self. It is an experience of sharing, of communion, which permits the full unfolding of one's own inner activity. The experience of love does away with the necessity of illusions. There is no need to inflate the image of the other person, or of myself, since the reality of active sharing and loving permits me to transcend my individualized existence, and at the same time to experience myself as the bearer of the active powers which constitute the act of loving. What — Erich Fromm

He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lovely sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them. — W. Somerset Maugham

Cause I rely on my illusions, to keep me warm at night. I've denied in my capacity to love, and I am willing to give up this fight — Sarah McLachlan

The trouble with illusions is that you aren't aware you have any until they are taken away from you. — Mary Doria Russell

Perhaps he was probing the enigma of why men fall in love with their dreams, which are then so destroyed by harsh realities that their dreamers become cuckolded by their own illusions. Perhaps... — Juan Filloy

Good becomes perfect, but perfect is an illusion. And illusions are like all spells - temporary and soon broken. And when that happens, feelings change. — Erin McCahan

Man is not to fight with other human races, other human individuals, but his work is to bring about reconciliation and Peace and to restore the bonds of friendship and love. We are not like fighting beasts. It is the life of self which is predominating in our life, the self which is creating the seclusion, giving rise to sufferings, to jealousy and hatred, to political and commercial competition. All these illusions will vanish, if we go down to the heart of — Rabindranath Tagore

My tactic is to look at you
To learn how you are
Love you as you are
My tactic is to talk to you
And listen to you
And construct with words
An indestructible bridge
My tactic is to stay in your memory
I don't know how
Nor with what pretext
But stay within you
My tactic is to be honest
And know you are too
And that we don't sell each other illusions
So that between us there is no curtain or abyss
My strategy instead is
Deeper and simpler.
My strategy is that some day
I don't know how, nor with what pretext
That finally you need me. — Mario Benedetti

I looked at her. Sheila was my girl
the girl I wanted
and wanted for keeps. But it wasn't any use having illusions about her. Sheila was a liar and probably always would be a liar. It was her way of fighting for survival
the quick easy glib denial. It was a child's weapon
and she'd probably never got out of using it. If I wanted Sheila, I must accept her as she was
be at hand to prop up the weak places. We've all got our weak places. Mine were different from Sheila's, but they were there. — Agatha Christie

I don't sell spells, and I don't sell tricks. I don't carry illusions or marked cards or weighted coins. I cannot sell you an endless purse or help you win the lottery. I can't make that girl you've got your eye on fall in love with you, and I wouldn't do it even if I could. I don't have a psychic hotline to your dead relatives, I don't know if you're going to be successful in your career, and I don't know when you're going to get married. I can't get you into Hogwarts or any other kind of magic school, and if you even mention those stupid sparkly vampires I will do something unpleasant to you. — Benedict Jacka

We cling to love's illusions because they're real. — Marty Rubin

Perhaps lovers aren't supposed to look down at the ground. That kind of story is told in symbols
and earth represents reality, and reality represents frustrations, chance illnesses, death, murder, and all kinds of other tragedies. Lovers are meant to look up at the sky, for up there no beautiful illusions can be trampled upon. — V.C. Andrews

True adulthood would mean no longer denying the truth. It would mean feeling the repressed suffering, consciously acknowledging the story remembered by the body at an emotional level, and integrating that story instead of repressing it. Whether contact with the parents can then in fact be maintained will depend on the given circumstances in each individual case. What is absolutely imperative is the termination of the harmful attachment to the internalized parents of childhood, an attachment that, though we call it love, certainly does not deserve the name. It is made up of different ingredients, such as gratitude, compassion, expectations, denial, illusions, obedience, fear, and the anticipation of punishment. Time — Alice Miller

An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art.
The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love. — Louis Sullivan

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. — Oscar Wilde

It began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply sleeping beside another body night after night gives no express right of entry to the interior world of their thoughts or dreams;that we are separate in the end whatever contrary illusions we may cherish; and that this miserable truth might as well be faced, since it will be dinned into one, like it or not by the failings of those we hold dear. I wasn't so bitter now. I'd begun to emerge into a sense of satisfaction with my not, but it would be a long time before I trusted someone, for I'd seen how essentially unknowable even the best loved might prove to be. — Olivia Laing

No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. — Daphne Du Maurier

In our seeking for the lost Child, our contemplation of Our Lady becomes active. The fiat was complete surrender. Advent was a folding upon the life growing in our darkness. Now the seeking is a going out from ourselves. It is a going out from our illusions, our limitations, our wishful thinking, our self-loving, and the self in our love. — Caryll Houselander

I had no illusions about love anymore. It came, it went, it left casualties or it didn't. People weren't meant to be together forever, regardless of what the songs say. — Sarah Dessen

After dinner Natasha went to the clavichord, at Prince Andrey's request, and began singing. Prince Andrey stood at the window, talking to the ladies, and listened to her. In the middle of a phrase, Prince Andrey ceased speaking, and felt suddenly a lump in his throat from tears, the possibility of which he had never dreamed of in himself. He looked at Natasha singing, and something new and blissful stirred in his soul. He was happy, and at the same time he was sad. He certainly had nothing to weep about, but he was ready to weep. For what? For his past love? For the little princess? For his lost illusions? For his hopes for the future? Yes, and no. The chief thing which made him ready to weep was a sudden, vivid sense of the fearful contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable existing in him, and something limited and material, which he himself was, and even she was. This contrast made his heart ache, and rejoiced him while she was singing. — Leo Tolstoy

I lost my illusions in a black rain of bitterness - now what do you see in my eyes? How can you still love me? How can I be tender? ... — John Geddes

Molly Bea, she of the hard white breasts lightly dusted with golden freckles, would never be so humiliated by life because she could never become as deeply involved in the meaty toughness of life. She would never be victimized by her own illusions because they were not essential to her. She could always find new ones when the old ones wore out. But Cathy was stuck with hers. The illusion of love, magically changed to a memory of shame. — John D. MacDonald

The teachings of the Mage Guild were that none of these others was real, no one else and nothing anywhere was real, that everything around him was merely a shadow born of Alain's own illusions. He had accepted that wisdom - until he had met Mari. In a world where nothing was allowed to change, Alain had been changed.
He could let himself feel emotions again. He had learned what it meant to help someone else. He had learned what a friend was. He had forgotten what love was. Until he had fallen in love. — Jack Campbell

Maybe, the lesson we can all learn from the inner sadness of a Narcissist is to see through our own fabrications, our own illusions so that we can be set free to be real once more. — Shannon L. Alder

And when I fall in love," I began, "I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both worlds, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact. And the purple grass will grow all around, high enough to reach our eyes. — V.C. Andrews

Do you dislike Children? I ask, entertained at the little one's cleverness in dodging capture attempts.
"I don't dislike them, nor do I like them. I've never understood why one must love children simply because they are children. I don't love people because they are people; in fact, I rarely like any people at all. If a child is somehow deserving of admiration, I certainly won't deny it, but why hand it out like candy on Queen's Day?"
I laugh, surprising him.
"Do you think me terribly cruel, then?"
"Actually, I agree. It is another great fault of mine my mother endeavored to correct. Children in general I've never cared for, though individual children I love very much."
-Quote from "Illusions of Fate" by Kiersten White p.17 — Kiersten White

Our illusions-the beliefs we hold on to-are the very doorways to our freedom. We simply have to enter through them without grasping or pushing away. We must not believe them, but we must not run away from them either. We need to see each moment of apparent bondage as an invitation to freedom. Then it becomes an act of love, an act of compassion, to stop running away. — Adyashanti

That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love. — Eugene H. Peterson

Being a woman, I have found the road rougher than had I been born a man. Different defenses, different codes of ethics, different approaches to problems and personalities are a woman's lot. I have preferred to shun what is known as feminine wiles, the subterfuge of subtlety, reliance on tears and coquetry to shape my way. I am forthright, often blunt. I have learned to be a realist despite my romantic, emotional nature. I have no illusions that age, the rigors of my profession, disappointments, and unfulfilled dreams have not left their mark.

I am proud that I have carved my path on earth almost entirely by my own efforts, proud that I have compromised in my career only when I had no other recourse, when financial or contractual commitments dictated. Proud that I have never been involved in a physical liaison unless I was deeply attracted or in love. Proud that, whatever my worldly goods may be, they have been achieved by my own labors. — Joan Fontaine

When the thunder rumbles,
Now the age of gold is dead.
When the dreams we've clung to
Trying to stay young,
Have left us parched and old instead.
When my courage crumbles,
When I feel confused and frail,
When my spirit falters on decaying altars
And my illusions fail
I go on right then.
I go on again.
I go on to say I will celebrate another day.
I go on.
If tomorrow tumbles
And everything I love is gone,
I will face regret all my days, and yet
I will still go on. — Leonard Bernstein

He then explained his new philosophy, which followed the devastating discovery that Love and Friendship were the veriest illusions. He explained that people married because their sexual appetite had to be satisfied and there must be somebody to manage the house. There was nothing deeper than that in any man and woman relationship. — R.K. Narayan

Are you looking for something real in this world of illusions? Call me. Casual Flings need not apply. I am looking for Love. — Aprilynne Pike

Playing with various approaches may be due to resistance to going within, to the fear of having to abandon the illusion of being something or somebody in particular.Of all the affections the love of oneself comes first. Light and love are impersonal.When you do not think yourself to be this or that, all conflict ceases. Any attempt to do something about your problems is bound to fail, for what is caused by desire can be undone only in freedom from desire. You cannot be rid of problems without abandoning illusions. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Happiness, thou art naught but an illusion. Thy enchantments are cast upon my eyes, my mind, my spellbound heart. Dependent upon nothing but thy victim's perception of thee, souls soar at thy artful hand! I have fallen in love with thy illusions, Happiness. Thou hast made me a part of them, and I am left delirious. — Richelle E. Goodrich

We are all united by both pain and love. Both a smile and a wound. We are all united by these very basic yet very influential things, because we all recognize them, we all know what they feel like to have or to give. Everything else, all the other things that do not unite us - those things are all illusions. — C. JoyBell C.

Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: The realm. Do you know what the realm is? It's the thousand blades of Aegon's enemies, a story we agree to tell each other over and over, until we forget that it's a lie.

Lord Varys: But what do we have left, once we abandon the lie? Chaos? A gaping pit waiting to swallow us all.

Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish: Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some, are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is. — George R R Martin

More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea . . .
That if enough people looked at you, you'd never need anybody's attention ever again.
That if someday you were caught, exposed, and revealed enough, then you'd never be able to hide again. There'd be no difference between your public and your private lives.
That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you'd never want to own or do another thing.
That if you could eat or sleep enough, you'd never need more.
That if enough people loved you, you'd stop needing love.
That you could ever be smart enough.
That you could someday get enough sex.
These all became the little boy's new goals. The illusions he'd have for the rest of his life. These were all the promises he saw in the fat man's smile — Chuck Palahniuk

Every person's story contains chapters of pain and loss, victory and defeat, love and hate, pride and prejudice, courage and fear, faith and self-distrust, charity and kindness, selfishness and jealously. Every person's story also contains folios of hopefulness and truthfulness, deceit and despair, action and change, passion and compassion, excitement and boredom, birth and creation, mutation and defect, generation and preservation, delusions and illusions, imagination and fantasy, bafflement and puzzlement. What makes a person's selfsame story unique is how he or she organizes the pure and impure forces that comprise them, how they respond to internal and external crisis, if they act in a safeguarding and humble manner, or lead a self-seeking and destructive existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The joy of a party is the newness of people to each other, renewed strikingness of humanity. They love each other, to distraction. Really to distraction. Before they fall into conversation and separate ... The strangeness, and the hopes aroused by strangeness, are illusions. Mirages arising wherever people gather expectantly together. — Dorothy Richardson

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost."
So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions."
An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes. — Anne Rice

Well, eighteen, then. And I saw you with him the other night at the opera." She laughed nervously as she spoke, and watched him with her vague forget-me-not eyes. She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church. — Oscar Wilde

When there is a total understanding of need, the outward and the inner, then desire is not a torture. Then it has a quite different meaning, a significance far beyond the content of thought and it goes beyond feeling, with its emotions, myths and illusions. With the total understanding of need, not the mere quantity or the quality of it, desire then is a flame and not a torture. Without this flame life itself is lost. It is this flame that burns away the pettiness of its object, the frontiers, the fences that have been imposed upon it. Then call it by whatever name you will, love, death, beauty. Then it is there without an end. — Allan W. Anderson

Our goal while on this earth is to transcend our illusions and discover the innate power of our spirit. We are responsible for what we create, and we must therefore learn to act and think with love and wisdom and live in service to others and all life. — Caroline Myss

Leo Vincey, know now the truth; that all things are illusions, even that there exists no future and no past, that what has been and what shall be already is eternally. Know that I, Ayesha, am but a magic wraith, foul when thou seest me foul, fair when thou seest me fair; a spirit-bubble reflecting a thousand lights in the sunshine of thy smile, grey as dust and gone in the shadow of thy frown. Think of the throned Queen before whom the shadowy Powers bowed and worship, for that is I. Think of the hideous, withered Thing thou sawest naked on the rock, and flee away, for that is I. Or keep me lovely, and adore, knowing all evil centred in my spirit, for that is I. Now, Leo, thou hast the truth. Put me from thee for ever and for ever if thou wilt, and be safe; or clasp me, clasp me to thy heart, and in payment for my lips and love take my sin upon thy head! Nay, Holly, be thou silent, for now he must judge alone. — H. Rider Haggard

Creating art is paradoxical because an artist seeks to express truth by penetrating and destroying illusions. Art is always the outpouring of a mind striving to achieve the impossible reconciliation of all the fragmented shards that make people human: frivolous amusements, idle moments, feelings of tenderness and pain, stored memories, future expectations, and unquenchable thirst to experience love and witness beauty. — Kilroy J. Oldster

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed. — Dana Gioia

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Sapiens: A Brief History of Us

I am
Four billion years of mutations
Hurling through space on a rock that grew green
And beauty.
Berry-picker, mammoth-hunter, storyteller,
Begetter of souls.
Cognition.
And I imagine. I believe. I surrender. We love.
And I believe
Bravely.
Shared myths, illusions weeping, a world
Connected by chafe and
Poetry.
Life-giving secrets in
Immortal words in a la la land
Cresting.
I am
A wave
Breathing. Would die for you.
I believe.
I am. — Anne P. Collini

He was dead; I needed to let his memory go, too. That was the first step for me, before discrimination.
Yet my love was the ghost of a young girl's dream. It walked alone in the abyss, stubbornly, where only illusions prospered on tears and regrets. My love had a life of its own; it was perverted but nevertheless still vital. For that reason, I wanted to return to deep space. Honestly, I would have preferred it if we had traveled forever and never stopped at another star system. To fall into endless blackness, that was my new fantasy.
The young girl with the ancient dream wept. I could hear her; I even saw her tears on the glass of the observation deck. It made me feel old. I didn't want to know her name. I couldn't forget Tem but I needed to forget her. — Christopher Pike

Forgiveness is key to enchanted love because it is key to living right, period. It is the capacity to see beyond the veil of personality and worldly illusions. No one is perfect or attractive every day. Forgiveness means we are capable of relating to someone on a deeper level than the ordinary self. And that we are committed to doing so no matter what the appearances are, no matter what the situation is. — Marianne Williamson

Friendship has its illusions no less than love. — Stendhal

safety and love are both illusions! — Eric Jerome Dickey

There are certain delicate illusions that make life bearable. Love, in its most pure and pathetic form, the one before we get to genuinely know the person we love, is one of them. Ignorance is bliss, and the less you know, the more you love, the less you have, the more you want.
We all miss the most the things we never had. — Cristian Mihai

Obsessive love is built on a tissue of illusions: that by having sex with someone you can possess that person's soul; that you can transmute past defeats into present triumphs without understanding or mourning; that you make the unloving love you by constancy, uncomplaining availability, and molding yourself into what you thing that person wants. — Jeanne Safer

All lovers in the world are alike: they fall in love by chance; they see each other, and are attached to each other by the features of their faces; they illuminate each other by the fierce preference which is akin to madness; they assert the reality of illusions; and for a moment they change falsehood into truth. — Henri Barbusse

To clothe the penguins is a very serious business. At present when a penguin desires a penguin he knows precisely what he desires and his lust is limited by an exact knowledge of its object. At this moment two or three couples of penguins are making love on the beach. See with what simplicity! No one pays any attention and the actors themselves do not seem to be greatly preoccupied. But when the female penguins are clothed, the male penguin will not form so exact a notion of what it is that attracts him to them. His indeterminate desires will fly out into all sorts of dreams and illusions; in short, father, he will know love and its mad torments. And all the time the female penguins will cast down their eyes and bite their lips, and take on airs as if they kept a treasure under their clothes! . . . what a pity! — Anatole France

Dogs, lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose a dog, and there's going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can't support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There's such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and the mistakes we make because of those illusions. — Dean Koontz

Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality. — Anthony De Mello