Ponzo Illusions Quotes

To commit one's life to the Jesus Reality is far more than an intellectual undertaking. While the Reality of Jesus is a perspective, it is not a worldview in the sense of a particular cosmology, or a body of doctrinal knowledge requiring assent. Rather it is a Word that addresses our lives and speaks to our human condition. It demands that we examine our own hearts, take inventory of our human failings, and open our lives to forgiveness and grace. It breaks the illusions of our self-importance and self-reliance, and calls us to recognize the Spirit reality that already exists in our midst and already lives in our hearts. ~ John F. Baggett

Hearing may make shorter intuitive leaps than sight, but it too is subject to illusions. The most pleasant of these are 'mondegreens,' named by the author Sylvia Wright from her youthful mishearing of the Scottish ballad that actually says, 'They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / and they layd him on the green'--not, alas, 'the Lady Mondegreen.' Children, with their relaxed expectations for logic, are a rich source of these (pledging allegiance to 'one Asian in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all'), but everyone has the talent to infer the ridiculous from the inaudible--and, what's more, to believe in it. Here, at least, we do behave like computers, in that our voice-recognition software has little regard for probability but boldly assumes we live in a world of surrealist poets. We are certain that Mick Jagger will never leave our pizza burning and that the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hot cement. ~ Michael Kaplan

Haven't I told you scores of times, that you're always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? That's something you don't understand, and can't understand until you've gone through it yourself. You're still at the state of unlimited illusions, when a good, strong pair of legs makes the hardest road look short, and you've such a mighty appetite for glory that the tiniest crumb of success tastes delightfully sweet. You're prepared for a feast, you're going to satisfy your ambition at last, you feel it's within reach and you don't care if you give the skin off your back to get it! And then, the heights are scaled, the summits reached, and you've got to stay there. That's when the torture begins; you've drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. Pride has had its brief portion of celebrity; you know that your best has been given and you're surprised it hasn't brought a keener sense of satisfaction. From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all hopes that once attracted you towards it. There's nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don't want to feel you're played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make l ~ Emile Zola

Each of her words was the skip of a stone across a lake, forming ripples of emotion. The Queen of Inys could not cast illusions, but her voice and bearing on this night had turned her into an enchantress. ~ Samantha Shannon

As a general rule, in the world of magic, the most successful magician is the one who has enough patience to keep the secrets of his original magic effects. ~ Amit Kalantri

There are six billion egos living on this planet. Can you not see why the world is in such a sorry state? Can you not see why we are destroying Heaven on Earth for our own short-term gain? Can you not see why the tiger and the gorilla are facing extinction, along with countless other species? Can you not see why there is so much injustice, abuse, greed, cruelty, and inequality upon this planet? We get along with those who share the same set of illusions. It is called collusion. They are our friends. We declare war on those who dare to believe in another set of illusions. They are our enemies. Religion, and particularly religious fundamentalism, is the most obvious and dangerous example. Nationalism is another. "Me! Me! Me!" "Mine! Mine! Mine!" "I'm right. I'm right. I'm right." "How can I use this or make use of this?" "What's in it for me?" You ~ Mary Bruggeman

It's what we live for, to be able to make great illusions. The thing about 'Entourage' is everything we do is realistic. We go to the real places, we shoot on location. We get the real people. It's a perfect marriage between fact and fiction. ~ Adrian Grenier

Matter was itself intelligent, constantly mutating and producing new forms, some of them self-aware. As a child Leopardi had written an essay on 'the souls of beasts', and he is clear that consciousness is not confined to humans. The difference between beasts and human beings is not that humans are self-aware while beasts are not. Both are conscious machines. The difference lies in the greater frailty of the human soul, which produces illusions of which beasts have no need. ~ John N. Gray

Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness. ~ Haruki Murakami

I have lived too long to cherish many illusions about the essential high-mindedness of men when brought into stark confrontation with the issue of control over their security, and their property interests. ~ Haile Selassie

The phrase "Old Soul" is the closest many can come to describing those who feel like they have seen and done it all before, who can see through the lies and illusions of existence, and who experience a tired longing to "return home. ~ Aletheia Luna

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better. ~ Nancy Gibbs

It would be a marvelous thing if in the process of your listening - unemotionally, not sentimentally - to what is being said … you could really understand sorrow and be totally free of it; because then there would be no self-deception, no illusions, no anxieties, no fear, and the brain could function clearly, sharply, logically. And then, perhaps, one would know what love is. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Mankind could point with pride to this fine flower of the human spirit--if it were not for one thing: namely that God is God and grace is grace. At this point begins the destruction of our illusions and of our cultural enthusiasm, the great destruction which God himself effects, and which the ancient myth of the tower of Babel typifies. 'And if by grace, then it is no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace.' Our way to the eternal is interrupted and we are plunged back into the depths from which we came, with out philosophy and art, our morality and religion. For another way now opens, the way of God to man, the way of revelation and grace, the way of Christ, the way of justification by faith alone. 'My ways are not your ways,' that is the answer now. It is not we who go to God, but God who comes to us. It is not religion that sets us right with God, for God alone can do this; it is his action on which we must depend. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings Vibrate most readily to minor chords, Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words Which voice the passion and the ache of things: Illusions beating with their baffled wings Against the walls of circumstance. ~ Amy Lowell

Sometimes love is nothing more than a sticky web; illusions spun from clever minds and bitter hearts. ~ Nicole Lyons

Molly Bea, she of the hard white breasts lightly dusted with golden freckles, would never be so humiliated by life because she could never become as deeply involved in the meaty toughness of life. She would never be victimized by her own illusions because they were not essential to her. She could always find new ones when the old ones wore out. But Cathy was stuck with hers. The illusion of love, magically changed to a memory of shame. ~ John D. MacDonald

She was fifty-three years old and lonely and oppressed; why couldn't he let her have her illusions? That was what her wounded, half-drunken eyes had seemed to be saying throughout his interrogation: Why can't I have my illusions?
Because they're lies, he told her silently in his mind as he champed his jaws and swallowed the cheap food. Everything you say is a lie.(...) Everything you live by is a lie, and you want to know what the truth is?
He watched her with murderous distaste as she fumbled with her spoon. They had ordered ice cream, and some of it clung to her lips as she rolled a cold mouthful on her tongue.
Do you want to know what the truth is? The truth is that your fingernails are all broken and black because you're working as a laborer and God knows how we're ever going to get you out of that lens-grinding shop. The truth is that I'm a private in the infantry and I'm probably going to get my head blown off. The truth is, I don't really want to be sitting here at all, eating this goddam ice cream and letting you talk yourself drunk while all my time runs out. The truth is, I wish I'd taken my pass to Lynchburg today and gone to a whorehouse. That's the truth. ~ Richard Yates

Everything in the past is memory and everything in the future is imagination. Those're both illusions – memories are unreliable and we just speculate about the future. The only thing that's completely real is this one instant of the present – and that's constantly changing from imagination to memory. So, see? Most of our life's illusory. ~ Jeffery Deaver

I wanted to tell him to wake up before it was too late, but I no longer feel a responsibility to people who are so willing to die having done nothing they wanted to do, having lived for others who never cared any way, muddling along, waiting for a grave to open. My life means infinitely more to me than that. I decided to do what I want, to follow my beliefs no matter what it takes or what I must suffer, lose, abandon. Today I became more of that Xavier persona than ever before. I felt so confident in my self, so self-assured that I didn't care whether those listening to me thought I was crazy, because to me, living in illusions is crazy, staying alive just to eat, screw and work is crazy. I am the sane one, the way I see it now. They asked me what I believed. I said, 'I believe that I can do anything, that I am a product of all that I have thought, that I create my reality and am constantly exploring for ways to make radical changes in my life, by the use of my mind, my behavior -- my actions.' I just gave them a little taste, but they didn't look at me with the look of 'this guy is crazy.' they seemed to be astounded that I would say those things aloud. ~ Mike Darigan

I have no illusions that my work can rouse the masses to create change, because literature simply doesn't have that power anymore in my country, if it does anywhere. But I do hope that it can be read by those who are in positions to create change, or that it can at least be part of that dialogue. ~ Miguel Syjuco

In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time. Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

Looking for a saviour in the sky? Be serious! Know you still not that there ain't any saviour but science! Get rid of your cultural craps and your religious illusions! Be realist! In this universe, only the realists have the chance to save themselves! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

What is real for me are the illusions I create with my paintings. Everything else is quicksand. ~ Eugene Delacroix

Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one. ~ Elbert Hubbard

Science similarly contains within itself the devices for correcting the illusions of science. That is its crowning glory. When we come upon intellectual endeavours that contain no such devices - one might cite psychoanalysis, grand political theories, 'new age' science, creationist science - we need not be interested. ~ Simon Blackburn

What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. ~ Sigmund Freud

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I was looking at the sensoriums of heroes. I was sensing through the eyes and nose of Shelley and John Webster, and using the hearing and touch of Ginsberg and Duncan and Kerouac–– and the jazz lucidity of Creeley, and the Doug fir of Snyder, and the almost mystical, physical perceptions of D.H. Lawrence and of Olson himself. I was convinced that poetry was about, by, and from, the meat, that poetry was the product of flesh brushing itself against experience. We are seekers moving in the Tathagata brushing ourselves against the universe of the real, solid illusions. It is by our touches that we become ourselves –– as our ancestors became us and as we became our maturing, sharpening, brightening selves. ~ Michael McClure

And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

People enjoy the passion of delusions. However, the world is built on a basis that if you free yourself, you find yourself within another illusion. There is always a truth hidden within a truth. It is no different from illusions and deceptions of reality. The question then becomes
how does one become truly free? ~ Lionel Suggs

Illusions are dangerous because they have no faults. Victims of abuse have illusions that the abuser is a good person, because they told them so. ~ Tracy Malone

Wisdom will not go with comforting illusions, false sentiment, or the use of rose-colored glasses. ~ J.I. Packer

It's the reason we say "pork" and "beef" instead of "pig" and "cow." Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. ~ Mary Roach

The painter knew the mirror lied. And the canvas told the truth. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

I adored you without thinking of you physically. I kissed your smile and adored your illusions. ~ Julia De Burgos

The wave came again and carried them out onto the sea of pain, where he wondered again why life ever came into the world...The tide that drew them out into the troubled waters once again spent itself, and they floated slowly back, resting for a minute or so, only to be dragged out again. He held her up while she contracted and pushed inside herself, trying to open the petals of her flowering body...He lifted her, trying to free the load she was struggling with, but she was straining against the traces, getting nowhere, her eyes like those of a draft horse...Who would choose this, thought Laski, this work, this woe? Life enslaves us, makes us want children, gives us a thousand illusions about love, and all so that it can go forward. ~ William Kotzwinkle

He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lovely sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them. ~ W. Somerset Maugham