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.
Growing up in the Boroughs, I thought I must be the cleverest boy in the world, an illusion that I was able to maintain until I got to the grammar school.
A lot of people do that kind of nostalgia stuff believing that they were very happy in their teenage years, but that’s probably just an illusion.
Infinite love is the only truth. Everything else is illusion.
Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to experience emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music.
Making films is sort of like you’re pulling off a magic trick. It’s sort of like an illusion. It’s not real but you want it to appear real, and all kinds of things go into that, from the clothes you’re wearing to the make-up, to the light.
I think I meant that, given the circumstances of my childhood, I had the illusion that it’s easier to be alone. To have your relationships be casual and also to pose as a solitary person, because it was more romantic. You know, I was raised on the idea of the ramblin’ man and the loner.
There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.
He didn’t maintain my illusion of myself, he gave me an illusion of myself. Before I met him, I never thought of myself as an actress. Boy, he sidetracked me in a great way!
I think that the Oscar gives you some kind of guts or something, it gives you the illusion that you can do it. It’s good for business.
Just like all my novels, ‘Illusion’ is a good way to observe where Frank Peretti was in his life when he wrote it.
Whenever I see a forecast written out to two decimal places, I cannot help but wonder if there is a misunderstanding of the limitations of the data, and an illusion of precision.
I love the idea I can go off with a single camera and a few rolls of film unencumbered… I was not interested in the illusion of reality, I wanted to get close to what was happening.
You are traveling and see these people shooting the entire experience of going through a city, and maybe in the back of their minds they sustain the illusion that they will edit it all, but I don’t think that’s it.
Only here, because of the illusion of intellectualism, our society separates the validity of human expression.
Law not served by power is an illusion; but power not ruled by law is a menace which our nuclear age cannot afford.
Even if I have already peaked, I have to believe I can improve. I wake up every morning, and go to practice, with the illusion that I’m going to get better that day.
Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
Everybody needs to show respect to each others’ ways and the cultural life that you get on this planet. Don’t get caught up on ‘I’m brown, black, white, red, blue, whatever.’ You gotta ask, what were you called before 1492? All these names we’re using now are just an illusion made to keep us fighting each other.
It’s nice to sort of walk in and at least create the illusion that you are, or your character is, a well-rounded human being, a complete person. Especially when you’re playing these impressive, high-functioning professionals. You feel like you have to come in sort of guns blazing.
Part of my reason for ‘Session 9’ was to break out, to destroy the illusion of me as ‘Mr. Romantic Comedy Guy.’
Playing a character is an illusion, and I feel that when you know too much about a person, possibly part of that illusion is disrupted.
Tradition is the illusion of permanance.
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.
The only real things in life is the unexpected things. Everything else is just an illusion.
You can’t walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.
The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.
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!
Because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that ‘Guitar Hero’ is the same as a real guitar.
There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.
My point was that it’s hard to make good films, but I’m not under any illusion that you do all the time.
