Top 176 Illusory Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.

Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.

Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to becomes master of your own destiny, you have more to learn.

It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule.

In truth there is only one freedom - the holy freedom of Christ, whereby He freed us from sin, from evil, from the devil. It binds us to God. All other freedoms are illusory, false, that is to say, they are all, in fact, slavery.

One of the common responses to criticism of psychics is to suggest that even if their powers are illusory, there is no harm done. After all, the audience seem to enjoy the show and Sally and the theatres certainly enjoy the profits.

Life is there ahead of you and either one tests oneself in its challenges or huddles in the valleys of a dreamless day-to-day existence whose only purpose is the preservation of a illusory security and safety. The latter is what the vast majority of people choose to do, fearing the adventure into the known.

When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

The future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.

Shrouded by the 'dodgy dossier,' which warped opaque intelligence, none of the stated war aims in Iraq spoke to the British national interest. Illusory dreams of bringing Western-style democracy to the Middle East were punctured by failures of planning and strategy, as catalogued before the Chilcot Inquiry.

When you become famous, people can have a powerful yet illusory idea of who you are. You want to live your life, but still, you don't want to let anyone down. I know Ed Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Jerry Cantrell, all those guys felt it. They're smart, real, and all of a sudden, they're put on a pedestal.

There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of 'escape of energy,' that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

It's good to remember often, every day, that you are not a physical creature in a physical universe; but a non-physical consciousness vibrating at a certain frequency. You are Consciousness having a state of being, that's it. Everything else you perceive is simply an illusory crystallization of your chosen vibration. You are the Creator of your life, in this way.

Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul. . . . When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.

In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own.

Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times.

Adam Smith saw the greed of modern capitalism for what it was - a form of destructive ambition that may have favorable effects on the productive capacities of society, but which is of no direct benefit to anyone - not even to the greedy themselves, whose illusory chase after a will-o-the-wisp leaves them morally bankrupt and unhappy.

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.

By creating so many illusory images of physical perfection, whether on store aisles or storefronts ads, magazine covers or TV show, we speak more to the profit margins of companies than the self-esteem of today's girls.

I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.

We become obsessed with 'truth' when discussing statements, just as we become obsessed with 'freedom' when discussing conduct...Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal.

A vital function of the free market is to penalize inefficiency and misjudgment and to reward efficiency and good judgment. By distorting economic calculations and creating illusory profits, inflation will destroy this function.

Jimmy Meng sought to be a power broker in the halls of justice. But the influence he sought to peddle was corrupt, and his power was illusory.

Today, it may seem as if there are demons attacking me from within. I should remember that demons are illusory, and that when I think that I'm being attacked by unseen forces, it probably just means that I am going insane.

Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have .. the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality .. which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.

The people who seem to have a lock on power get swept out in a couple of years. So it's naïve to keep swinging at the same targets over and over. It took me a long time to realize, but most of the shackles that I flailed against were just illusory.

When you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated little stranger confronting all this, you are under the influence of an illusory feeling, because the truth is quite the reverse. You are the whole works, all that there is, and always was, and always has been, and always will be.

I urge people to be a scientist about what they want and ask themselves why they want it so badly. Perhaps they are chasing an illusory dream. But if you want to learn, to expand, to be of service, you will find a way.

When our thoughts look real, we live in a world of suffering. When they look subjective, we live in a world of choice. When they look arbitrary, we live in a world of possibility. And when we see them as illusory, we wake up inside a world of dreams.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.

One of the things he'd always loved about Clary was how easily caught up in her imagination she was, how easily she could wall herself away in illusory worlds of curses and princes and destiny and magic.

Paraphrased: Among the degrees of the universal Manifestation, each sentient creature typically experiences an illusory sense of autonomy. At the same time, with or without the creature's awareness, the creature subsists eternally as an "immutable prototype" in the divine Knowledge.

Rooting in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going. And this makes politics and politicians.

Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow– priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web.

The world is illusory, Only Brahman is real, Brahman is the world

The promotion of the culture of life should be the highest priority in our societies...If the right to life is not defended decisively as a condition for all other rights of the person, all other references to human rights remain deceitful and illusory.

Online gambling is very seductive and very illusory. It can seem like a really good idea. It can seem like what people told you to work hard and get ahead, but when someone shows you something and it's too good to be true, it probably is.

First of all there will appear to you, swifter than lightning, the luminous splendor of the colorless light of Emptiness, and that will surround you on all sides. ...Try to submerge yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self, all attachment to your illusory ego.

Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.

Donald's monstrosity is the manifestation of the very weakness within him that he's been running from his entire life. For him, there has never been any option but to be positive, to project strength, no matter how illusory, because doing anything else carries a death sentence; my father's short life is evidence of that.

This ´world´ began to forget it was Oneness, like a dream forgetting it is the dreamer. With this amnesia came the phenomenon we call fear, an expression of All Possibility that cannot manifest within the balance of Oneness. Fear only comes with the illusion of division and separation when consciousness perceives itself as part and not the whole. Fear is the shadow of illusory disconnection.

Sydney Smith playfully says that common sense was invented by Socrates, that philosopher having been one of its most conspicuous exemplars in conducting the contest of practical sagacity against stupid prejudice and illusory beliefs.

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.

The trouble with words is that they give us the illusory sense that we are making ourselves understood as well as understanding what others are saying. However, when we turn around and come face-to-face with our destiny, we discover that words are not enough.

Transcendence implies the surpassing of two things, and the consequent attainment of a third thing. But there are no 'things' in reality, of any kind whatever: there is only the thing-in-itself, its suchness, which is Reality, revealed when the illusory dualism of inexistent qualities is dissolved.

You can never get rid of all of your fears. Some are necessary and a part of life. But most of our fears are illusory, based on risks or threats that exist only in our minds. Such fears constrain and make you miserable. The feeling of moving past a particular fear is one of liberation and freedom.

Bangkok 8 is one of the most startling and provocative mysteries that I've read in years. The characters are marvelously unique, the setting is intoxicating and the plot unwinds in dark illusory strands, reminiscent of Gorky Park. Once I started, I didn't want to put it down.

EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside-- be glad for me.

After generations of living under medical tutelage, which provides us with protection (albeit illusory) against "dangerous drugs", we have failed to cultivate the self-reliance and self-discipline we must possess as competent adults surrounded by the fruits of our pharmacological-technological age.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

A happy life, a life making full use of all our potential is and must be a balanced life. The obstacles to it are mainly illusory; most of our limitations are self-imposed.

To be choiceless is to be in meditation. To be choiceless is to enter the eternal. To be of choice is to enter the world: the dream world, the divided world, the false, the pseudo, the illusory world.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there…the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

By creating so many illusory images of physical perfection, whether on store aisles or storefront ads, magazine covers or TV shows, we speak more to the profit margins of companies than the self-esteem of today's girls.

Learn to see it in thyself and thou wilt understand the infinite essence, hidden in all illusory forms. Understand that the world which thou knowest is only one of the aspects of the infinite world, and things and phenomena are merely hierolgyphics of deeper ideas.

To transcend the identification with the body one has to realize the auspiciousness and divinity residing within each cell of the body. One needs to realize the illusory nature of the body.

I had a number of different labels. A lot of people assumed I was gay because I was wearing a man's suit, and one had to learn that it's OK, people will do that, and you don't always have to explain it one hundred percent, because they're never going to accept what your own interpretation is. It's all illusory.