#illusion

In this life struggle, here I am among you fully cognizant that a true believer has no fear of what God has ordained for him. Those who are visited by fear live only for their present, under the illusion that the world began with them and will end with their departure. ↗

— King Hussein I

#among #began #believer #cognizant #departure

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there. ↗

— David Knopfler

#behind #best #craft #create #curtain

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#illusion #more #nothing #sad #than

I think that the Oscar gives you some kind of guts or something, it gives you the illusion that you can do it. It's good for business. ↗

— Benicio Del Toro

#gives #good #guts #i #i think

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered. ↗

— Stanley Kubrick

#been #brilliantly #consoling #create #illusion

In our natural state, we are glorious beings. In the world of illusion, we are lost and imprisoned, slaves to our appetites and our will to false power. ↗

— Marianne Williamson

#beings #false #glorious #illusion #imprisoned

Luck is merely an illusion, trusted by the ignorant and chased by the foolish. ↗

— Timothy Zahn

#foolish #ignorant #illusion #luck #merely

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#artifice #dead #death #decadence #decadent

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box. Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down. That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#empire-state-building #farewells #new-york-city #beauty

One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion ↗

— Voltaire

#optimism #status-quo #illusion