Home > Topic > the illusion
141 " Writting turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life. "
― Philip Roth , American Pastoral (The American Trilogy, #1)
142 " There is an inherent, humbling cruelty to learning how to run white water. In most other so-called " adrenaline" sports—skiing, surfing and rock climbing come to mind—one attains mastery, or the illusion of it, only after long apprenticeship, after enduring falls and tumbles, the fatigue of training previously unused muscles, the discipline of developing a new and initially awkward set of skills.Running white water is fundamentally different. With a little luck one is immediately able to travel long distances, often at great speeds, with only a rudimentary command of the sport's essential skills and about as much physical stamina as it takes to ride a bicycle downhill. At the beginning, at least, white-water adrenaline comes cheap.It's the river doing the work, of course, but like a teenager with a hot car, one forgets what the true power source is. Arrogance reigns. The river seems all smoke and mirrors, lots of bark (you hear it chortling away beneath you, crunching boulders), but not much bite. You think: Let's get on with it! Let's run this damn river!And then maybe the raft hits a drop in the river— say, a short, hidden waterfall. Or maybe a wave reaches up and flicks the boat on its side as easily as a horse swatting flies with its tail. Maybe you're thrown suddenly into the center of the raft, and the floor bounces back and punts you overboard. Maybe you just fall right off the side of the raft so fast you don't realize what's happening.It doesn't matter. The results are the same.The world goes dark. The river— the word hardly does justice to the churning mess enveloping you— the river tumbles you like so much laundry. It punches the air from your lungs. You're helpless. Swimming is a joke. You know for a fact that you are drowning. For the first time you understand the strength of the insouciant monster that has swallowed you.Maybe you travel a hundred feet before you surface (the current is moving that fast). And another hundred feet—just short of a truly fearsome plunge, one that will surely kill you— before you see the rescue lines. You're hauled to shore wearing a sheepish grin and a look in your eye that is equal parts confusion, respect, and raw fear.That is River Lesson Number One. Everyone suffers it. And every time you get the least bit cocky, every time you think you have finally figured out what the river is all about, you suffer it all over again. "
143 " Justice is always naive and self-confident; believing that it will immediately win once recognized. That is the reason why the forces of Justice are so poorly organized. On the other hand, the Evil is cynic, sly and fantastically organized. It never ever has the illusion of the ability to stand on its own feet and to win in a fair competition. That is why it is ready to use any kind of means without hesitation. And of course it does - under the banners of the most noble ideas. "
― Vladimir Bukovsky
144 " The problem with communication…is the illusion that is has been accomplished. "
― George Bernard Shaw
145 " The behaviour of the human nervous system in certain altered states creates the illusion of dissociation from one’s body (less commonly understood in hunting and gathering shamanistic societies as possession by spirits). "
― James David Lewis-Williams , Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
146 " To see through the illusion of duality, remember that fear and darkness have no substance in themselves, for they do not indicate the presence of a second universal force, but are only names given to the one Light unperceived. "
― Eric Micha'el Leventhal
147 " I am LifeYour pure essence, spirit and seed of existence itself,That lies within you, longing to awaken and flourish.I am long before you and after you, never born, never die,timeless, without boundaries.I am pure unconditional love, wholeness,connectedness, freedom, bliss,joy, peace, stillness.I am That beyond the gross and limited,yet you are blinded.You choose the illusion that you have controlthrough grasping and being caughtby all that is unreal and comes and goes.You think you are alive but you barely know Life.You choose separation.It is time to wake up!Have strength, courage and trust to let go.Surrender the fear and all that imprisons you.I am beyond mind, thoughts, emotions, ego, conditioning, desires, needs, attachments, memories, dreams, goals, forms, identities, ideas.Beyond all that arises.When all that I am not is released and let go, I AM....Total, whole, eternal,infinite.And such also is all that arises.No more questions.Home.No more you, I, us.No more words. "
148 " Bruises and dried blood covered her face, giving the illusion of chicken pox. "
― Yawatta Hosby , One By One
149 " I don't write so that people will understand me, I write because I know they don't. And, I can't help feeling like I should at least give them the illusion that they do. "
150 " [H.G. Wells said] that his method was " to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds." Such prestidigitation is a characteristic ploy of science fiction: to make a nonexistent entity or impossible premise acceptable (often by scientific-sounding terms such as telepathy, extraterrestrial, cavorite, FTL speed) and then follow through with a genuinely realistic, logically coherent description of the effects and implica "
151 " Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity "
― Thornton Wilder , The Ides of March
152 " Reality is a projection of your thoughts or the things you habitually think about. Your entire life and everything in it is a result of your belief system coupled with your thoughts. The feelings and emotions you have cement this in your mind, and the illusion of all of this combined is what you see as your reality on a moment-to-moment and day-to-day basis. "
― Stephen Richards , How to Get Everything You Can Imagine: Volume 1: How Mind Power Works
153 " Why is it so easy to abandon ourselves, and why do we so easily fall into the illusion that this self-abandonment is the only way people will like us? "
― Ariana Carruth
154 " 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
155 " Every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they’ve been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we’re whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you’re not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that’s been developed… "
― Terence McKenna
156 " [Tolstoy] does not necessarily get rid of [his angry] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one's native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms. "
― George Orwell
157 " It took us a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions. "
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb , The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
158 " As the savage progresses, he acquires experience and formulates codes of 'right' and 'wrong' from his memories of those courses which have helped or hurt him... Then out of the principle of barter comes the illusion of 'justice' ... "
― H.P. Lovecraft
159 " Blame is a Defense Against PowerlessnessBetrayal trauma changes you. You have endured a life-altering shock, and are likely living with PTSD symptoms— hypervigilance, flashbacks and bewilderment—with broken trust, with the inability to cope with many situations, and with the complete shut down of parts of your mind, including your ability to focus and regulate your emotions.Nevertheless, if you are unable to recognize the higher purpose in your pain, to forgive and forget and move on, you clearly have chosen to be addicted to your pain and must enjoy playing the victim.And the worst is, we are only too ready to agree with this assessment! Trauma victims commonly blame themselves. Blaming oneself for the shame of being a victim is recognized by trauma specialists as a defense against the extreme powerlessness we feel in the wake of a traumatic event. Self-blame continues the illusion of control shock destroys, but prevents us from the necessary working through of the traumatic feelings and memories to heal and recover. "
― Sandra Lee Dennis
160 " Being loved means; are disagreements welcome in my relationships? If you cant disagree with someone then you live in a tyranny and if you live in a tyranny then you are only loved to the degree that you erase yourself and conform to the irrational expectations of bullies. That isn't love obviously. Now if somebody in you life demands that you not disagree with them and gets angry, " offended" , or outraged should you disagree with them then, that person is not a good person. It's pretty narcissistic. It's somebody who does not have the maturity, wisdom, and ego strength to handle, and in fact welcome disagreements. When people disagree with me as a whole I think it's a great opportunity for learning. People don't want to expose topics that might cause disagreement because, if the disagreement is punished then the illusion of being loved by good people is shattered. "