Illusion Quotes - page 11
Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God. We are well aware that making sense and picturing are artificial, like illusion; but we can never give them up. For belief (thinking out and interpreting the present and the future) is our most important characteristic.
Gerhard Richter
In [19]'46, I had started to awaken to the world. At first, the Russians nationalized everything [in East-Germany / DDR]. Rich people had their property taken away, and the people got access to their libraries, which was wonderful for me. I read Hermann Hesse. Thomas Mann was a little too heavy for me. But Lombroso, Nietzsche. Materialists, I would call them – writers who said there was no god, no spirit, that freedom is an illusion. That affected me deeply.
Gerhard Richter
It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is-since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.
H. P. Lovecraft
(...) To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor not-being, neither living nor not-living. It is a state of pure awareness, beyond limitations of space and time. Once the illusion that the mind-body is oneself is abandoned, death loses its terror, it becomes a part of living.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
... Latino or Hispanic families are quite matriarchal, if you hadn't noticed -- despite what we let the men believe. Hey, that's the way it goes. The men know it too, but we have to keep that illusion alive for them -- that there're the boss. Hey, I see that strikes a cord. Thank God, the men are applauding too.
Gloria Estefan
Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete.
Henry Miller
The newspapers still talk about glory but the average man, thank God, has got rid of that illusion. It is a damned bore, with a stall mate as the most probable outcome, but one has to see it through, and see it through with the knowledge that whichever side wins, civilisation in Europe will be pipped for the next 30 years. Don't indulge in Romance here, Malcolm, or suppose that an era of jolly little nationalities is dawning. We shall be much too much occupied with pestilence and poverty to reconstruct.
E. M. Forster
