This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.
Illusion |
A wonderful realization will be the day you realize that you are unique in all the world. There is nothing that is an accident. You are a special combination for a purpose -- and don't let them tell you otherwise, even if they tell you that purpose is an illusion. (Live an illusion if you have to). You are that combination so that you can do what is essential for you to do. Don't ever believe that you have nothing to contribute. The world is an incredibly unfulfilled tapestry. And only you can fulfill that tiny space that is yours.
Day | Illusion | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Space | Unique | Will | World |
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see -- not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.
Business | Ceremony | Hope | Illusion | Innocence | Light | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Wealth | World | Business |
Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach
The present age... prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence... for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.
Appearance | Illusion | Present | Truth |
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.
Mary Antin, fully Mary Antin Grabau
It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
For man to have a glimpse of lasting happiness, he has first to realize that God, being in all, knows all; that God alone acts and reacts through all; that God, in the guise of countless animate and inanimate entities, experiences the innumerably varied phenomena of suffering and happiness. Thus, it is God who has brought suffering in human experience to its height, and God alone who will efface this illusory suffering and bring the illusory happiness to its height. Whether it manifests as creation or disappears into Oneness of Reality, whether it is experienced as existing and real, or is perceived to be false and nonexistent, illusion throughout is illusion. There is no end to it, just as there is no end to imagination.
Experience | God | Illusion | Man | Oneness | Phenomena | Suffering | Will | God | Happiness |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
Before he can know Who he is, man has to unlearn the mass of illusory knowledge hehas burdened himself with on the interminable journey from unconsciousness to consciousness. It is only through love that you can begin to unlearn, and, eventually, put an end to all that you do not know. God-love penetrates all illusion, while no amount of illusion can dim God-love. Start by learning to love God by beginning to love those whom you cannot. You will find that in serving others you are serving yourself. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity, the less you remember yourself; and when you completely forget yourself, you find me as the Source of all Love.
Beginning | God | Illusion | Journey | Kindness | Knowledge | Learning | Love | Man | Unconsciousness | Will | God |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
In life after death, the experiences of pain and pleasure become much more intense than what they were in the earthly life. And These subjective states of intensified suffering and joy are respectively called hell and heaven. Hell and heaven are states, of the mind; they should not be looked upon as being places; and, though, from the subjective point of view, they mean a great deal for the individualised soul, they are both illusions within the greater illusion of the phenomenal world.
Heaven | Hell | Illusion | Joy | Life | Life | Pain | Pleasure | Suffering |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
The individual souls are like the drops in the ocean. Just as each drop in the ocean is fundamentally identical with the ocean, the soul which is individualised due to bhas or illusion is still the Oversoul, and does not really become separate from the Oversoul.
Illusion | Individual | Soul |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
All illusion comes and goes, but the soul remains unchanged. What is meant by God-realization is to actually experience this important thing — that the soul is eternal.
Experience | Illusion | Important | Soul |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
God is eternally free. To realize God is to attain liberation from the bondage of illusion. The greater the strife and the more intensified the struggle to attain liberation, the more the shackles of illusion are felt, because this very action brings greater awareness of the illusion, which then becomes all the more impressive and realistic. All actions, whether good or bad, just or unjust, charitable or uncharitable, are responsible in making the bond of illusion firmer and tighter. The goal is to achieve perfect inaction, which does not mean merely inactivity. When the self is absent, one achieves inaction in one's every action.
Action | Awareness | God | Good | Illusion | Self | Struggle | God | Awareness |
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
The individual mind is the seat of the ego or the consciousness of being isolated. It creates the limited individuality, which at once feeds and is fed by the illusion of duality time and change. So, in order to know the self as it is, consciousness has to be completely freed from the limitation of the individual mind. In other words, the individual mind has to disappear but consciousness has to be retained.
Consciousness | Duality | Ego | Illusion | Individual | Mind | Order | Self | Time |
But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
Illusion | Man | Object | Power | Prison | Reflection | Soul |
Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo
Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
Miguel de Unamuno, fully Miguel de Unamuno y Jogo
The most tragic thing in the world and in life... is love. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion; love is consolation in desolation; it is the sole medicine against death, for it is death's brother.
The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany.... One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.
Illusion |
The curious fascination in this job [U.S. representative] is the illusion that either you are being useful or you could be -- and that's so tempting.
Illusion |