Top 202 Illusion Quotes

Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favor freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

Beyond self-driving cars, I think all airplanes should go pilotless. Get the pilots out of there. Even better, have no cockpit at all, and turn it into a nice lounge with a bar. Why give people the illusion of control with a steering wheel?

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.

There are Eastern religions that deny the reality of pain and suffering. They just try to wipe it away by saying it’s all an illusion.

There is no cure for ugly, but you can make yourself into a human optical illusion.

Ultimately, it’s an illusion that you can understand yourself.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe – responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix. The ancient Vedas – the oldest Hindu philosophy – and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that’s true, there’s no such thing as a past or a future – it’s all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.

I am under no illusion that I will ever be the greatest opera composer in the world, with Wagner and Verdi and Strauss before me. I think my work could fit very nicely into musicals, though.

There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate, upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

A lot of the demonstrations that I do, when I get inside people’s minds, is understanding human behavior and understanding how people think and getting their patterns down so I know how to create the illusion that I get inside their brain.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.

Magic’s an art where you use slight of hand or illusion to create wonder. And I was just intrigued with that idea.

I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

We don’t believe other people’s experiences can tell us all that much about our own. I think this is an illusion of uniqueness.

The science-denial machinery is a serious adversary, and it has a big advantage over real science: it does not need to win its dispute with real science; it just needs to create a public illusion that there is a dispute.

I think the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It’s actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what’s killing us.

Most of us enter adult life with great ambitions for how we will start our own ventures, but the harshness of life wears us down. We settle into some job and slowly give in to the illusion that our bosses care about us and our future, that they spend time thinking of our welfare.

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species – us.

Let’s make a deal with the Serbs. Neither history nor emotion in the Balkans will permit multinationalism. We have to give up on the illusion of the last eight years… Dayton isn’t working. Nobody – except diplomats and petty officials – believes in a sovereign Bosnia and the Dayton accords.

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

‘Grand Illusion’ and ‘Rules of the Game’ are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.

I probably complicate things unnecessarily now just to give the illusion of professionalism.

We go on dates thinking that person is our future husband or wife, without getting to know them, as we live in a fantasy and an illusion of romance.

The ICRC did not see Nazi Germany for what it was. Instead, the organization maintained the illusion that the Third Reich was a ‘regular partner,’ a state that occasionally violates laws, not unlike any army during World War II, occasionally using illegal means and methods of warfare.

You know, a lot of things changed. What never changed is the illusion to keep playing tennis, the illusion to keep doing well the things, and the illusion to be in a good position of the ranking and play these kind of matches.

I’m under no illusion that there are things about me that I’d like to change. I just accept who I am, and I’m proud of it.

The thought of someone spending $20 to come and see me and saying, ‘Oh, I prefer the record and she’s completely shattered the illusion’ really upsets me. It’s such a big deal that people come give me their time.

I continue with the illusion of serving Colombia. Only God knows if it were to be from the presidency.

I’ve never been a six-foot-tall, skinny model, so therefore, I want to create an illusion. People always think I’m taller than I am – not just because of the shoes I wear but because of the way I dress. It’s all relatively streamlined.

The secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is to give the other side the illusion of control. Don’t try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Ask questions, that begin with ‘How?’ or ‘What?’ so your opponent uses mental energy to figure out the answer.

I don’t really think I am the most beautiful woman in the world at all. If I can create some illusion to that effect – and it seems I have – then that is what spells success to me.

Love matches, so called, have illusion for their father and need for their mother.

Gaga is an entertainer, so a hat for her is part of the illusion of entertaining.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

When the Bible and the Gospels say that the victims should have been spared, they do not merely ‘take pity’ on them. They puncture the illusion of the unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving and reordering device of human communities.

Limits, like fear, is often an illusion.

Performance-enhancing drugs are an illusion. I wish I had never gotten involved with steroids. It was wrong. It was stupid.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

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.

If, for a moment, it seemed that September 11th could be identified with Iraq, the illusion was short-lived.

Let’s just shatter the illusion. I am not wealthy. I’ve lived in the same house for the past 30 years.

The problem with our role is Americans live in a world of illusion.

The soul is an illusion.

Now there was no wonder in the Statue of Liberty illusion because he, Copperfield, attempted to do something so large that it stretched the credibility of the audience to the point where most people didn’t believe any of it anymore.

The N.R.A.’s blessing of restrictions on bump stocks – devices that make semiautomatic weapons fire faster – is designed to pre-empt anything more serious by giving the illusion of action. It substitutes accessory control for actual gun control.

We think we’re saving time with microwaves, cell phones, beepers, computers and voice mail, but often these things help us create the illusion of getting somewhere – and they foster a chain of constant activity. We’re really just squeezing extra activity into every minute that we gain.

The ingrained image of black men being searched by the police feeds into the collective illusion that black men everywhere need to be policed more than others.

Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy.

We were talking about the space between us all and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion. Never glimpse the truth – then it’s far too late when they pass away.

Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.

A change in external circumstances without inner renewal is a materialist’s illusion, as though man were only a product of his social circumstance and nothing else.

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.

Nobody should have any illusion about the possibility of gaining military superiority over Russia. We will never allow this to happen.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes… just be an illusion.