Anyone who believes that it is possible to educate the will without cultivating the insight that enlivens it is succumbing to illusion. Clear-sightedness on this point is a task for present-day pedagogy, but it can come only from a life-filled understanding of the whole human being.
I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.
I just think, as a model, it's taught me to be a master of deception and illusion.
People are starting to wake up to the fact that a media/political party-complex basically decide our candidate, then create the illusion for the rest of us that in fact we're the ones who did the deciding.
Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is.
Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.
Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion.
I think the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It's actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what's killing us.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
Stardom is just an uneasy seat on top of a tricky toboggan. Being a star is merely perching at the head of the downgrade. A competent featured player can last a lifetime. A star, a year or two. There's all that agony of finding suitable stories, keeping in character, maintaining illusion.
Drag is there to remind culture not to take itself too seriously. All of this is illusion.
There is an important idea in psychology: The 'just world theory,' which says that it is very important for us to convince ourselves that the world is just and things happen for a reason. That there is some elemental fairness in everything, which creates the illusion of justice.
We need a romantic illusion to embark on relationships in the first place. After that, they survive or fail for other, more practical reasons.
TV shows and movies are a rare form of atemporality, and in an ever-changing, always-on world, spoilers feel irrefutable - sheer access to them gives the illusion of control.
The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time. We can't even comprehend it. It's such an illusion, it's such a strange thing.
