This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Antonio Machado, fully Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz
Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists.
Consolation | Culture | Illusion | Learning |
According to the true nature of things, everyone has all the sufferings of the world as his own; indeed, he has to look upon all merely possible sufferings as actual for him, so long as he is the firm and constant will-to-live, in other words, affirms life with all his strength. For the knowledge that sees through the principium individuationis, a happy life in time, given by chance or won from it by shrewdness, amid the sufferings of innumerable others, is only a beggar’s dream, in which he is a king, but from which he must awake, in order to realize that only a fleeting illusion had separated him from the suffering of his life.
Chance | Happy | Illusion | Knowledge | Life | Life | Nature | Order | Strength | Suffering | Time | Will | Words | World |
Many have declared the ultimate truth openly: that only the self is, that you are nothing other than the Self, that the universe is a mere manifestation of the Self, without inherent reality, existing only in the Self. This can be understood by the analogy of a dream. The whole dream-world with all its people and events exist only in the mind of the dreamer. Its creation or emergence takes nothing away from him, and its dissolution or reabsorption adds nothing to him; he remains the same before, during, and after. God, the conscious Dreamer of the cosmic dream, is the Self, and no person in the dream has any reality apart from the Self of which he is an expression. By discarding the illusion of otherness, you can realize that identity with the Self which always was, is, and will be, beyond the conditions of life and time. Then, since you are One with the Dreamer, the whole universe, including your life and all others, is your dream and none of the events in it have more than a dream reality. You are set free from hope and desire, fear and frustration, and established in the unchanging Bliss of Pure Being.
Desire | Events | Fear | God | Hope | Illusion | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | People | Reality | Self | Time | Truth | Universe | Will | World |
The alternative to the illusion of an ego is the Reality of inexhaustible, radiant Being. So long as the appearance of an ego remains, so long does the appearance of free will; in fact they are mutually dependent.
It is a paradox of the post-industrial age that, despite its technical omnipotence, it is as dominated by words and magic as any primitive tribe. A haze of empty words, coming from the word factories of the universities, is corrupting the air of our ailing cities. The young lurch not so much from one illusion to another as from one cliché to another.
I wonder whether even in the past total victory was not really an illusion from the standpoint of the victors. In a sense, there is not total victory short of genocide, unless it be a victory over the minds of men. But the total military victories are rarely victories over the minds of men.
The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.
A mystic sees beyond the illusion of separateness into the intricate web of life in which all things are expressions of a single Whole. You can call this web God, the Tao, the Great Spirit, the Infinite Mystery, Mother or Father, but it can be known only as love.
Father | God | Illusion | Life | Life | Love | Mother | Mystery | Spirit |
Love and kindness are here all the time, somewhere, in fact, everywhere. Usually our ability to touch them and be touched by them lies buried below our own fears and hurts, below our greed and our hatreds, below our desperate clinging to the illusion that we are truly separate and alone.
You too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
Madame La Comtesse, Diane de Vobrillac (Marie de Beausacq)
I prefer a dream to an illusion. In a dream I know my eyes are closed; in an illusion I think they are open.
Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL
He who sees oneness everywhere has surmounted illusion and sorrow.