Quotes about illusions

The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

Not seeing people permits us to imagine in them every perfection.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Anyone who refuses to struggle with actualities acquires phantoms to struggle against.

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.

Life was briskly and efficiently stripping Quentin of his last delusions about himself, one by one, shucking them off in firm hard jerks like wet clothes, leaving him naked and shivering.

Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.

I'm like everyone else - I see the world in terms of what I would like to see happen, not what actually does.

"What you don't understand you can make mean anything."

And how much did he and the others lost when they had turned their backs on magic? Belief, of course, and there might be some value in belief, although there was, as well, delusion and did a man want to pay for the value of belief in the coinage of delusion?

“Once such a strength of illusion is introduced into a world,” said Goffanon, “then it is hard to be rid of it. It will cloud the Mabden minds for many millennia to come. I know that I am right.”