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1 " Love is making friends with fear because fear is the constant companion of intimacy ~ and when you bring fear out of the darkness and into the light, you realize it was an illusion based on our own insecurities. "
2 " It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity. "
― John Gardner , Grendel
3 " Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen. "
― Fernando Pessoa , The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
4 " When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion. "
― Susan Blackmore
5 " It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. "
― W. Somerset Maugham , Of Human Bondage
6 " As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at... "
― Henry David Thoreau , A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod
7 " Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth. "
8 " Religion without reason is merely an illusion of religion – it is a mockery of religion, like it has become today. "
― Abhijit Naskar , Illusion of Religion: A Treatise on Religious Fundamentalism (Humanism Series)
9 " Control is an illusion that you must give up. "
― Grace Sara , Awakening in the 21st Century: Considering Existence
10 " When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true. "
― Audrey Niffenegger , The Time Traveler's Wife
11 " The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. "
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Slaughterhouse-Five
12 " Romance is an illusion of love and excitement that touches our hearts and mind. It lingers in our memories like a fairy tale. "
13 " Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself. "
― J. Krishnamurti
14 " I am Chandubhai’ is an illusion itself and from that are karmas charged. When does ‘charging’ of new karmas stop? When one attains the exact awareness of ‘who I am?’. "
― Dada Bhagwan
15 " Time is but an illusion created by beings with limited perception. "
― Ken Poirot
16 " Time is an illusion of life the life of the past and the future clouds men from the true life of the present. "
17 " if all of life were an illusion then the instruments science would use to measure reality could not be depended upon. "
18 " A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences. "
― Tom Robbins , Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
19 " Fear is like an illusion of a dangerous wall between you and your goal. "
20 " We were the only two people in the entire airport who lost total track of time, for we were consumed by space-time at that present moment. Time was irrelevant to our existence, for we didn’t want to exist outside the tight and glorious knots of each other’s arms. Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to aid in our sense of temporal presence in the vast ocean of space. Without the neurons to create a virtual perception of the past and the future based on all our experiences, there is no actual existence of the past and the future. All that there is, is the present. "
― Abhijit Naskar , Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a Scientist Who Found Himself by Getting Lost
