Phantoms Quotes

Who cares about an enlightened phantom? Only the other phantoms. It always needs a community of ignorant ideas and one of them maybe is a master -ignorant. The master of ignorance! There are no masters of knowledge. How can there be a master of knowledge ? How can there be a master of Heart? You can only be a master of shit. ~ Karl Renz

And yet fear builds its phantoms which are more fearsome than reality itself, and reality, when calmly analysed and its consequences willingly accepted, loses much of its terror. ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

They who, without any previous knowledge of us, think amiss of us, do us no harm; they attack not us, but the phantom of their own imagination. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

He had the arrogance of the believer, but none of the humility of the deeply religious. ~ V.S. Ramachandran

[Modern science] passed through a long period of uncertainty and inconclusive experiment, but as the instrumental aids to research improved, and the results of observation accumulated, phantoms of the imagination were exorcised, idols of the cave were shattered, trustworthy materials were obtained for logical treatment, and hypotheses by long and careful trial were converted into theories. ~ Thomas George Bonney

Even when the Phantom's leased, them hoes wanna get in. ~ Drake

If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred has made me so. If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me. ~ Gaston Leroux

This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer. ~ Jane Hamilton

Regard this fleeting world like this:
Like stars fading and vanishing at dawn,
like bubbles on a fast-moving stream,
like morning dewdrops evaporating on blades of grass,
like a candle flickering in a strong wind ...
echoes, mirages, and phantoms, hallucinations,
and like a dream. ~ Gautama Buddha

That he will haunt the footsteps of his enemy after death is the one revenge which a dying man can promise himself; and if men had power thus to avenge themselves the earth would be peopled with phantoms. ("Eveline's Visitant") ~ Mary Elizabeth Braddon

It's a mistake to think that if we don't remember or don't acknowledge painful experiences they will just disappear. In fact, great damage is done to us by those phantoms and pieces of memories that swim around in the unconscious, the part of us that never forgets. Unpleasant experiences gain power over us by being denied or hidden, but they can be made to relinquish that power when they are brought out in the open. ~ Susan Forward

Silence will illuminate you in God ... and deliver you from phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God ... In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then from our very silence is born something that draws us into deeper silence. May God give you an experience of this 'something' that is born of silence ~ Isaac Of Nenevah

We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half. ~ Mark Twain

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. ~ Emma Goldman

The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favourite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come, And make their bed with thee. ~ William C. Bryant

We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real. ~ Alan Greenspan

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh. ~ Mark Twain

White swan of cities slumbering in thy nest ... White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of the palaces and strips of sky. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled. ~ Siegfried Sassoon

They glided past, they glided fast,
Like travellers through a mist:
They mocked the moon in a rigadoon
Of delicate turn and twist,
And with formal pace and loathsome grace
The phantoms kept their tryst ~ Oscar Wilde

Walter looked about him lingeringly and lovingly. This spot had always been so dear to him. What fun they all had had here lang syne. Phantoms of memory seemed to pace the dappled paths and peep merrily through the swinging boughs–Jem and Jerry, bare-legged, sunburned schoolboys, fishing in the brook and frying trout over the old stone fireplace; Nan and Di and Faith, in their dimpled, fresh-eyed childish beauty; Una the sweet and shy, Carl, poring over ants and bugs, little slangy, sharp-tongued, good-hearted Mary Vance–the old Walter that had been himself lying on the grass reading poetry or wandering through palaces of fancy. They were all there around him–he could see them almost as plainly as he saw Rilla–as plainly as he had once seen the Pied Piper piping down the valley in a vanished twilight. And they said to him, those gay little ghosts of other days, "We were the children of yesterday, Walter–fight a good fight for the children of today and tomorrow. ~ L.M. Montgomery

Yet, I also began to have the sense, fostered in part by the cross-contamination of research, that around the world enclaves that never knew one another - writers who could not have read each other - still had communicated across decades and across vast distances, had stared up at the same shared unfamiliar constellations in the night sky, heard the same unearthly music: a gorgeous choir of unique yet interlocking imaginations and visions and phantoms. At such times, you wonder as both a writer and an editor if you are creating narrative or merely serving as a conduit for what was already there. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Truth is a necessary phantom. ~ Mason Cooley

I read the Phantom comics when I was in Australia shooting 'Dead Calm' and when one of the crew told me that there were plans for a movie, I went for it. That was in 1987 and I told (producer) Graham Burke I was going to be the Phantom. We had a laugh about that recently because you usually get what you deserve, not what you desire, and that is especially true in Hollywood! ~ Billy Zane

It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour. ~ Louis Sullivan

I loved him in that moment more than I thought possible, but it would end when this night did. We might chase the phantoms of these feelings for a while afterward, but in the end we'll concede defeat and move on. Nothing is meant to last past its novelty. Some things are too painful to chase after their expiration date. ~ Kaitlyn Oruska

Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms. ~ Victor Hugo

I miss you, mourn for you, and walk the streets alone- often at night, beside, I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face, yet not one word comes back to me. If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in; but if it lives and beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say so, and I will strike the strings to one more strain of happiness before I die. ~ Emily Dickinson

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality... Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life... Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness... a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation and regret... It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray to be the true object... of life. ~ Oscar Wilde

That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader. ~ Victor Hugo

To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells. ~ Fernando Pessoa

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.
Shall I swallow cave-phantoms? ~ Samuel Beckett

1. That reason is a gift of God and that we should believe in its ability to comprehend the world.

2. That they have been wrong who undermined confidence in reason by enumerating the forces that want to usurp it: class struggle, libido, will to power.

3. That we should be aware that our being is enclosed within the circle of its perceptions, but not reduce reality to dreams and the phantoms of the mind.

4. That truth is a proof of freedom and that the sign of slavery is the lie.

5. That the proper attitude toward being is respect and that we must, therefore, avoid the company of people who debase being with their sarcasm, and praise nothingness.

6. That, even if we are accused of arrogance, it is the case that in the life of the mind a strict hierarchy is necessary.

7. That intellectuals in the twentieth century were afflicted with the habit of baratin, i.e., irresponsible jabber.

8. That in the hierarchy of human activities the arts stand higher than philosophy, and yet bad philosophy can spoil art.

9. That the objective truth exists; namely, out of two contrary assertions, one is true, one false, except in strictly defined cases when maintaining contradiction is legitimate.

10. That quite independently of the fate of religious denominations we should preserve a "philosophical faith," i.e., a belief in transcendence as a measure of humanity.

11. That time excludes an ~ Czesław Miłosz

I always found it weird when the Phantom would call Raoul insolent boy and the Raoul was obviously older than him. ~ Hugh Panaro

When iridescent summer nights fade into sullen autumn gray, as the world marches grimly towards the slow, cold death of winter, something changes.

Dark spirits strengthen, emboldened by lengthening shadows and huddled masses. The sunshine of youth once kept these phantoms at bay, but the doors to my soul creak slowly open with the passing years, the seams of a skeptical mind loosen as the autumn of life approaches. ~ Evans Light

Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows ... not ideograms but a straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-nonsense surety. ... The fire burned it's steady, slow flame, and phantoms danced in its incandescent core. ~ Stephen King

All our lives we are engaged in preserving our experiences and keeping them fresh by artificially sprinkling the water of memory over them. They have ceased to retain their original smell and fragrance. Do you call it life- this effort at the preservation of a phantom freshness in something that is withered and gone? ~ Vimala Thakar

Because it was the dishonesty on his face that intrigued me. I appreciated the ghosts that haunted him. The phantoms that shadowed his eyes even as they danced and danced and danced. ~ A Meredith Walters

Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
On death ~ John Keats

I haven't seen Clones, which has been during this period when I haven't seen much of anything, but I did see Phantom Menace, and see my feelings about it - see, first of all, I think that when you make a lot of movies, your attitude about the movies changes. ~ Lawrence Kasdan

Action always happens in the present, because it is an expression of the body, which can only exist in the here and now. But the mind is like a phantom that lives only in the past or future. It's only power over you is to draw your attention our of the present. ~ Dan Millman

The struggle for power had reached a new stage; it was fought with scientific formulas. The weapons vanished in the abyss like fleeting images, like pictures one throws into the fire ...
When new models were displayed to the masses at the great parades on Red Square in Moscow or elsewhere, the crowds stood in reverent silence and then broke into jubilant shouts of triumph ...
Though the display was continual, in this silence and these shouts something evil, old as time, manifested itself in man, who is an outsmarter and setter of traps. Invisible, Cain and Tubalcain marched past in the parade of phantoms. ~ Ernst Junger

We walk in darkness with phantoms and spectres we know not of, and our little world plunges blindly through abysses toward a goal of which we have no conception. That thought itself is a blow at our beliefs and comprehension. We used to content ourselves by thinking we knew all about our world, at least; but now it is different, and we wonder if we really know anything, or if there can be safety and peace anywhere in the wide universe. ~ Donald Wandrei

I've dreamed of you so much you're losing your reality.
Is there still time to reach that living body and kiss
onto that mouth the birth of the voice so dear to me?
I've dreamed of you so much that my arms, accustomed
to being crossed on my breast while hugging your shadow
would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
And, faced with the real appearance of what has haunted
and ruled me for days and years, I would probably
become a shadow.
o sentimental balances.
I've dreamed of you so much it's no longer right
for me to awaken. I sleep standing up, my body exposed
to all signs of life and love, and you
the only one who matters to me now, I'd be less able
to touch your face and your lips than the face and the lips
of the first woman who came along. I've dreamed of you so much, walked so much, spoken
and lain with your phantom that perhaps nothing more is left me
than to be a phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow
than the shadow that walks and will joyfully walk
on the sundial of your life. ~ Robert Desnos

Love is best a phantom than reality, better in the chase than caught. ~ Jessie Burton

The roughest make-up I ever wore was for 'Phantom of the Opera' because the phantom's face was all disfigured, and he's trying to pass in public so he can attend his beloved opera. That was make-up over make-up. ~ Robert Englund

It should not be a surprise, even if it is not expected, if a shadow dances among the leaves, a face appears (or seems to), even a community of phantoms from the past. Here you will find answers, questions, and a host of stories. ~ Mary Lois Timbes

You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power.
("Mind Over Murder") ~ Cornell Woolrich

This phantom world gave you false signs But you turned from the illusion and journeyed to the land of truth. ~ Rumi

Wood

We age in darkness like wood
and watch our phantoms change
their clothes
of shingles and boards
for a purpose that can only be
described as wood. ~ Richard Brautigan

Then as Anna listened another sound began to rise within the first. It began as a low keening, like the wind in a bottle tree, almost indiscernible amid the guns. Yet it was there, and it grew and grew, gaining strength and timbre until suddenly a new note broke away and was taken up: a high weird quavering like nothing that Anna had ever heard, that peopled the smoke with an army of mourning phantoms. Anna had heard the men talk of this, too - the uncanny demon cry of the Rebel army going into the attack - and now here it was for real, echoing across violence and death for the last time in a wild crescendo that seemed to peak and yet peak again: descanting blood, crying lost youth and the loss of all dreams. One last time it shrilled out of the rolling smoke, then collapsed all at once into a maelstrom of voices - the deep snarling utterance of thousands of men in hell. ~ Howard Bahr

The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the captain's, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas; - a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere. ~ Herman Melville

The eye of the spirit can nowhere find more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more mysterious, and more infinite. There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the inmost recesses of the soul.

To make the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic. Conscience is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions. Penetrate, at certain hours, past the livid face of a human being who is engaged in reflection, and look behind, gaze into that soul, gaze into that obscurity. There, beneath that external silence, battles of giants, like those recorded in Homer, are in progress; skirmishes of dragons and hydras and swarms of phantoms, as in Milton; visionary circles, as in Dante. What a solemn thing is this infinity which every man bears within him, and which he measures with despair against the caprices of his brain and the actions of his life! ~ Victor Hugo

Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and
our vices, straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our
souls. God shows them to us in order to induce us to reflect.
Only since animals are mere shadows, God has not made them
capable of education in the full sense of the word; what is the
use? On the contrary, our souls being realities and having a
210
goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on them
intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social
education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of
whatever sort it may be, the utility which it contains. ~ Victor Hugo

I was breaking down, wanting to fade away and cry, yet I feared ever being invisible again. My head lowered to conceal my humiliation behind a curtain of hair where I trembled as if sobbing.
"Hey, Gwen, it's okay. It's okay. Calm down."
I yearned to feel Daniel's soft touch meet my temple and then trace along my ear, brushing back the hairs from my face. What I wanted was the comfort his caress always afforded me. He moved as if he would grant my wish, realizing at the last moment that neither of us possessed the power to touch the other.
"Your hair, Gwen."
I refused to do what he wanted. I didn't care for him to see the shame plainly visible in my features. But the next thing I knew, his blue eyes were staring up at me from the ground, a glare reflecting off his glasses. The guy had dropped his books to fall over for a clear view of my face. His desperation made me laugh.
"It's going to be okay, Gwen, I promise."
- from "Phantom's Veil ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

But perhaps the the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality. ~ Albert Camus

A man's own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom "opinion" than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I went to see 'Phantom of the Opera' with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music ... Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time - the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music. ~ Lady Gaga

What! Would you make no distinction between hypocrisy and devotion? Would you give them the same names, and respect the mask as you do the face? Would you equate artifice and sincerity? Confound appearance with truth? Regard the phantom as the very person? Value counterfeit as cash? ~ Moliere

When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to me. She loves me forever. ~ Gaston Leroux

God is not an elusive dream or a phantom to chase, but a divine person to know. He does not avoid us, but seeks us. When we seek Him, the contact is instantaneous. ~ Neva Coyle

the living voice of God does not sound, pomp and ceremony, however elaborately observed, are like empty phantoms. So, we should see that papacy is so much wind. ~ John Calvin

For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I know you think what we have is sordid. Perhaps it is. Perhaps neither of us knows how to love properly and this is our twisted way of showing that we care. Or perhaps we should both be committed to an asylum ~ C.J. Archer

That was what humans did: They left on another messages through time, pressed between pages or carved into rock. Like reaching out a hand through time, and trusting in a phantom hoped-for hand to catch yours. Humans did not last forever. They could only hope what they made would endure. ~ Cassandra Clare

Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms all forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war must be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of the fatalities of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. It is difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the earth. ~ Victor Hugo

How could the human mind progress, while tormented with frightful phantoms, and guided by men, interested in perpetuating its ignorance and fears? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity: he has been taught stories about invisible powers upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and by unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and of directing his actions. ~ Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

Christine wouldn't choose him. But the reader won't forget him. They won't forget the Phantom's lamentations, his life, his love. They love the disfigured Phantom who casts off his mask. ~ Mizuki Nomura

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Old and sick, more than one hundred years Face haggard, hair white, I'm happy to still live in the mountains A cloth covered phantom watching the years flow by Why envy people with clever ways of living? ~ Hanshan

We all carry many selves, but in the end, these are just phantoms of possibility, nothing more than ghosts of broken destinies. ~ A. Lee Martinez

It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course
thousands in fact
but they could only ever be phantoms, agents, or, on rare occasions, reflections of the three real and self-willed beings who stood at the center. And even this essential trio would not remain intact; or so he taught. It would steadily diminish as the story unfolded, three becoming two, two becoming one, until the stage was left deserted. ~ Clive Barker

'Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually. ~ Jo Nesbo

A guilty conscience pushed me to try harder - which I did for what seemed like a tremendous amount of wasted time, staring bug-eyed at uncooperative pencils. What was missing? The answer seemed obvious - intense emotional incentive. But at the moment I didn't feel desperate or angry or afraid. Just severely bored out of my mind and guilt-ridden for feeling so mind-numbingly bored."
- from "Phantom's Veil ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fairy tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament. ~ Marc Chagall

Alexander once made himself supremely ridiculous. Coming across Epicurus's Principal Doctrines, the most admirable of his books, as you know, with its terse presentment of his wise conclusions, he brought it into the middle of the marketplace, there burned it on a figwood fire for the sins of its author, and cast its ashes into the sea. He issued an oracle on the occasion:
"The dotard's doctrines to the flames be given."
The fellow had no conception of the blessings conferred by that book upon its readers, of the peace, tranquility, and independence of mind it produces, of the protection it gives against terrors, phantoms, and marvels, vain hopes and insubordinate desires, of the judgment and candor that it fosters, or of its true purging of the spirit, not with torches and squills and such rubbish, but with right reason, truth, and frankness. ~ Lucian Of Samosata

The name Patrick Modiano drew a blank in the States when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. But in Paris, his home city, his many novels (more than thirty) are read, the screenplay he wrote for Louis Malle's masterpiece Lacombe, Lucien remains a favorite, and the songs he wrote for Françoise Hardy you hear in cafés and on the radio. Still, Modiano, as man and artist, remains a mystery man. The search for phantoms of history is his basic plotline, the searches as well as the enigmatic love stories, all of which take place along the streets of Paris. ~ Susan Cahill

Each county has usually some family, or personage, supposed to have been favoured or plagued, especially by the phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, who had for their ancestor a fairy, or John-o'-Daly of Lisadell, Sligo, who wrote Eilleen Aroon, ~ W.B.Yeats

Robert Duvall taught me years ago. He said, "You know theatre is not real. I don't like plays." You know, he doesn't like plays. And I agree with him in certain ways, you know. They can be fun. I don't mind going to see them. I went and saw Phantom of the Opera. I thought hey, that's cool. Look at the mask and all that. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all; you are a mere dream ~ Charlotte Bronte

Only while under the dominion of fear do men fall a prey to superstition; that all the portents ever invested with the reverence of misguided religion are mere phantoms of dejected and fearful minds; and lastly, that prophets have most power among the people, and are most formidable to rulers, precisely at those times when the state is in most peril. I think this is sufficiently plain to all, and will therefore say no more on the subject. ~ Christopher Hitchens

There is a haunting phantom called Regret, A shadowy creature robed somewhat like woe, But fairer in the face, whom all men know By her said mien, and eyes forever wet. No heart would seek her; but once having met All take her by the hand, and to and fro They wander through those paths of long ago
Those hallowed ways 'twere wiser to forget. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Every experience that traps me is a worldly experience. The world is seductive and hard to interpret for what it really is. Yet this world is nothing more than desire, and every desire makes me run after it. Why? Because I believe it's real. Desires are phantoms, concealing the grinning face of death. Be wise. Believe in nothing." It ~ Deepak Chopra

Yet I pity the poor wretch, though he's my enemy. He's yoked to an evil delusion, but the same fate could be mine. I see clearly: we who live are all phantoms, fleeing shadows. ~ Sophocles

All of the universes are but phantoms, mirages, and while they have their own essence, their own pantomime - they pass forgotten. ~ Frederick Lenz

Was there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was ― a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once while she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else. ~ Laini Taylor

Thoughts are phantoms. And when you fight with phantoms they always win. ~ Marty Rubin

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world: As star at dawn, a bubble in a stream A flash of lightning in a summer cloud A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream ~ Gautama Buddha

How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations. ~ Wallace Stevens

Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident. ~ Eckhart Tolle

The first step is for man to cease to be the slave of man. The second, is to cease to be the slave of the monsters of his own creation, the ghosts and phantoms of the air. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them. ~ Paul Henri Thiry D'Holbach

It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in a position properly to judge political matters. If this population has no political experience, no taste for seeing clearly for itself nor a tradition of initiative and critical judgment, its position with respect to politics grows more complicated, for nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for purposes of deception, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied. And moreover nothing is easier for human weakness than to merge religion with prejudices of race, family or class, collective hatreds, passions of a clan and political phantoms which compensate for the rigors of individual discipline in a pious but insufficiently purified soul. Politics deal with matters and interests of the world and they depend upon passions natural to man and upon reason. But the point I wish to make here is that without goodness, love and charity, all that is best in us - even divine faith, but passions and reason much more so - turns in our hands to an unhappy use. The point is that right political experience cannot develop in people unless passions and reason are oriented by a solid basis of collective virtues, by faith and honor and thirst for justice. The point is that, without the evangelical instinct and the spiritual potential of a living Christianity, political judgment and politic ~ Jacques Maritain

This film Phantom takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat. ~ Stephanie Zacharek

The Primal Plant is going be the strangest creature in the world, which Nature herself must envy me. With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on for ever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could, for they are not the shadowy phantoms of a vain imagination, but possess an inner necessity and truth. The same law will be applicable to all other living organisms. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Your voice at times a fist
Tight in your throat
Jabs ceaselessly at phantoms
In the room,
Your hand a carved and
Skimming boat
Goes down the Nile
To point out Pharaoh's tomb.
You're Africa to me
At brightest dawn.
The Congo's green and
Copper's brackish hue,
A continent to build
With Black Man's brawn.
I sit at home and see it all
Through you. ~ Maya Angelou

Because the soul is like a flower that folds its petals when dark comes, and breathes not its fragrance into the phantoms of the night. ~ Kahlil Gibran

The night crept on apace, the moon went down, the stars grew pale and dim, and morning, cold as they, slowly approached. Then, from behind a distant hill, the noble sun rose up, driving the mists in phantom shapes before it, and clearing the earth of their ghostly forms till darkness came again. ~ Charles Dickens

Tranquillity hides in small spaces, and when found needs to be treasured, because you know it's a phantom that will slip away again. ~ Diane Ackerman

Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans