Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Fantasies can be great, but we shouldn't make the wedding a fantasy, because the wedding is the gateway to married life. It shouldn't be a moment of illusion; it should be a moment of preparation.

Infinite love is the only truth. Everything else is illusion.

Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.

Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.

Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.

Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West.

For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.

I don't really think I am the most beautiful woman in the world at all. If I can create some illusion to that effect - and it seems I have - then that is what spells success to me.

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence.

In film, you can create the illusion of time and space. People speak; characters reveal their feelings. You can use music, which informs how you should be feeling, and it carries you to the right emotional space.

We were talking about the space between us all and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion. Never glimpse the truth - then it's far too late when they pass away.

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may.

Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life - I don't mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

Globalisation has obliterated distance, not just physically but also, most dangerously, mentally. It creates the illusion of intimacy when, in fact, the mental distances have changed little. It has concertinaed the world without engendering the necessary respect, recognition and tolerance that must accompany it.

I'm not religious. I was as a child, and like lots of people, I suppose, rapidly became very disillusioned with the whole thing. I also feel that organised religion has caused far more problems than it has solved.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

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.

The world is a complex place, and the influence of the media in its representation and its power of communication and interpretation is a remarkable amplifier of emotions, and of illusions.

There is no 'us' and 'them'; it's an illusion. We are all human beings, and we all have a responsibility to support one another and to discover ways of wresting the power from the very, very few people who control all the cash and all the property.