My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.
~By Harry Houdini ~
Infinite love is the only truth. Everything else is illusion.
~By David Icke ~
The idea that the world can unite without being regulated is clearly an illusion.
~By Guy Verhofstadt ~
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
~By John Steinbeck ~
A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.
~By George Jean Nathan ~
We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.
~By Judy Garland ~
I'm an idealist without illusions.
~By John F. Kennedy ~
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
~By Kenneth Clark ~
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
~By Cyril Connolly ~
Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.
~By Scott Adams ~
I don't have any illusions that what we are doing is sticking the the bottle. I don't think that's what we are doing. We are trying to make sure that the genie has friends, has food to eat, a way to grow.
~By Hilary Rosen ~
One travels to escape from it all, but that is the great illusion: It cannot be done, since one travels with one's mind.
~By Ella Maillart ~
Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions.
~By John Langdon ~
The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.
~By Horace Greeley ~
History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
~By Howard Nemerov ~
Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be - like the reality of yesterday - an illusion tomorrow.
~By Luigi Pirandello ~
A house must be built on solid foundations if it is to last. The same principle applies to man, otherwise he too will sink back into the soft ground and becomes swallowed up by the world of illusion.
~By Sai Baba ~
The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.
~By Walter Lippmann ~
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
~By Alan Watts ~
I believe there should be no arbitrary date set for withdrawal and yet no permanent, unending deployment. No cut and run, yet measured progress in helping a people who want to be free without an illusion of overnight success.
~By Rick Renzi ~
The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.
~By Sydney Smith ~
The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can't help it. It's the truth.
~By Charlie Chaplin ~
The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.
~By Ralph A. Cram ~
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
~By Noam Chomsky ~
When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.
~By Ralph Fiennes ~
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
~By Allan Bloom ~
Nothing like being visible, publishing one's work, and speaking openly about one's life, to disabuse the world of the illusion of one's perfection and purity.
~By Joyce Maynard ~
I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.
~By Bob Dylan ~
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
~By Joseph Conrad ~
Seeing how those companies operate, it didn't amount to a massive vote of confidence in their artists. There was talk of me going to Columbia after that, but nothing happened. I got disillusioned, and I pulled back.
~By Madeleine Peyroux ~
Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
~By Francoise Sagan ~
Do you think I am standing here, making this up as I go? I am sorry to disillusion you. I am not Robin Williams. I am the king of the pen.
~By Mitch Hedberg ~
You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
~By Luigi Pirandello ~
Right now, there's the illusion of order and civilization, but there's a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding.
~By Kathryn Bigelow ~
There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.
~By Bill Conti ~
Since fame is an illusion and death is in our future all we have is the next moment before we are swallowed into oblivion.
~By Al Goldstein ~
I no longer worry whether a painting is about something or not. I am only concerned with the expectation, from a flat surface, of an illusion.
~By William Scott ~
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
~By Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!
~By Michael Flanders ~
Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy.
~By Grace Jones ~
What staggers me is not the persistence of illusion, but the persistence of the world in the face of illusion.
~By A. G. Mojtabai ~
Ultimately, it's an illusion that you can understand yourself.
~By Paul Schrader ~
Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.
~By Jean-Paul Sartre ~
Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.
~By Arthur Erickson ~
And, hey, I'm not under the illusion that everything's just going to be hunky-dory work wise forever. I've never been under that illusion. Things could go away tomorrow.
~By Mel Gibson ~
Ugly. Is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion.
~By Margaret Cho ~
The problem with our role is Americans live in a world of illusion.
~By Talib Kweli ~
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
~By Albert Einstein ~
The occupation and robbery of a nation occurs under the illusion of freeing its citizens from brutal oppression.
~By Ramman Kenoun ~
Do not be misled by what you see around you, or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideals. But you are not part of that world.
~By Sai Baba ~
Being a famous actress may give you a sense of being important, but believe me, it's just an illusion.
~By Juliette Binoche ~
I have had four happy days in my life, and three of them turned out to be illusions.
~By Taylor Caldwell ~
No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.
~By Marguerite Duras ~
Official truths are often powerful illusions.
~By John Pilger ~
Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.
~By Philip Guston ~
Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.
~By Herman Wouk ~
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.
~By King Hussein I ~
People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.
~By Jose Saramago ~
What is a movie star? It is an illusion. It was everything I ever wanted to be, but it became a kind of shell, non? It was what made me famous and got me women. But it wasn't real.
~By Jean Claude Van Damme ~
Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.
~By Albert Claude ~
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
~By Elizabeth Bowen ~
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
~By Rebecca West ~
The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
~By Antonio Gramsci ~
It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos.
~By Manly Hall ~
Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.
~By Gertrude Stein ~
I must be more sensible and realize that at my age, illusions are hardly permitted and they will always destroy me.
~By Paul Cezanne ~
Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.
~By Bruce Sterling ~
Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
~By Andre Breton ~
I don't care if you're gay, black, Chinese, straight. That means nothing to me. It's all an illusion.
~By Joe Rogan ~
Allowing children to spew forth whatever is on their minds in the name of openness only creates an illusion of family closeness.
~By Neil Kurshan ~
If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.
~By Johann Most ~
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
~By Saul Bellow ~
I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.
~By H. P. Lovecraft ~
Just as the 99% of Soviet citizens who supported the Soviet regime in 1985 was no indication of what the people inside the USSR really thought, the army of true believers that we think we see in the Arab world is an illusion.
~By Natan Sharansky ~
Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.
~By Blaise Pascal ~
Law not served by power is an illusion; but power not ruled by law is a menace which our nuclear age cannot afford.
~By Arthur J. Goldberg ~
So what are we given? We're also given, my generation, the disillusionment of our parents.
~By Jewel Kilcher ~
In our natural state, we are glorious beings. In the world of illusion, we are lost and imprisoned, slaves to our appetites and our will to false power.
~By Marianne Williamson ~
By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.
~By Sydney Pollack ~
Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.
~By Voltaire ~
Because you know, down deep in my heart, when all is said and done, I still live under the illusion that basically people think of me as an up-and-coming young actor.
~By Jack Nicholson ~
What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
~By Pedro Calderon de la Barca ~
We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
~By Daniel J. Boorstin ~
As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.
~By John C. Hawkes ~
The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
~By Robert Wilson Lynd ~
The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.
~By Philip Guston ~
It is pure illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.
~By Pierre Bayle ~
Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.
~By Giotto di Bondone ~
It's really easy to get colors right. It's really hard to get black - and neutrals - right. Black is certainly a color but it's also an illusion.
~By Donna Karan ~
Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball.
~By James Patrick Murray ~
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.
~By Desiderius Erasmus ~
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
~By Leo Tolstoy ~
Realizing this, I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition.
~By Dan Flavin ~
Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.
~By David Cronenberg ~
I related to his disillusionment. Thinking that he was going for this big dream. Then he kind of saw through it all at one point and went back home. Then he started a bender, which I can relate to of course.
~By Woody Harrelson ~
I had great faith in Irish actors, that they'd be hip to the whole theatre thing, and they are. I had no illusions of coming over here as some kind of big shot. It's been a learning experience for me too.
~By Christopher Meloni ~
We have an illusion of security, we don't have security.
~By Isaac Yeffet ~
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
~By Oscar Wilde ~
Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions.
~By Henry R. Luce ~
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