"Illusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must indeed have very earnestly longed to bring to a close the life of fatigue and danger which he had for three years led, to have been able to cherish any illusion as to the success of the steps he was about again to take. Where was the hope of regaining the Fronde which had just been outrageously deceived, after it had given itself to the Prince de Conde in his misfortune, and had extricated ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... intolerable that similar power should reside in the hands of obscure nobodies about whom no illusion could possibly exist, whose tyranny is not admitted or public at all, who do not even take the risk of exposing their features, and to ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... I saw a house which amazed me. I thought I must be mistaken: I looked at it more closely,—looked at the houses near it, compared them with the first house and then with each other, and even then I believed that it was an optical illusion. I turned hastily down a side street, and still I seemed to see the same thing. At last I was persuaded that the fault was not with my eyes, but with the ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... journey through and about France and circling round Paris I found myself wondering sometimes whether all this war had not been a dreadful illusion without reality, and a transformation had taken place, startling in its change, from military turmoil to ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... as, with great difficulty, I groped my way back to the library, where I stood gazing at that strange counterpart of myself, till, under the growing horror of the situation, it seemed to my benumbed senses as though I were some disembodied spirit hovering above his own corpse. The horrible illusion was like a nightmare; I could not throw it off, and I would then and there have gone stark, staring mad, but that there came to me out of that awful chaos of fancies a suggestion which seemed like an inspiration. ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... was not yet eight, and as eight was the hour I usually indicated, the possibility suggested itself that her awakening was the result of an illusion, arising from habit, and perhaps, after all, this was a case of simple coincidence. In order to make a clean breast of it, and leave no room for doubt, I ordered the invalid to sleep until she should receive ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the donkey off the precipice, which proved to be only about two feet high, the gulf below being an illusion arranged with the aid of lights that shone ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... thirsting for poetry, and filled with the Divine Spirit. Thus, in their ignorance of the causes and their admiration of the facts, they pleased their fancy by regarding that inner man as divine, and constructing a mystical universe. Hence we have angels! A lovely illusion which Lambert would never abandon, cherishing it even when the sword of his logic was cutting off ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... other religions "as high as the heaven is exalted over the earth." The other races and religions thought that behind this proud criticism of Christian Europe there must be at least a well-possessed security for the world-peace. Of course it was an illusion. On no continent was the peace of mankind more endangered than in Europe, the very metropolis of Christianity and Christian civilisation. And it has been so not only during the last few years, it has been the case during the last thousand years, ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... story, would be altogether inexcusable, did not every artist have a habit of painting a background for his historical composition, instead of throwing the figures on the naked canvas and thereby losing half his little chance of illusion. The characters here introduced may live and move, but relieved against what? The background of current events, certainly—without a knowledge of which their actions might be altogether unaccountable. ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... that two women should so resemble each other? Am I the victim of an illusion of the senses? Have I recovered life only to lose reason? No; I know myself, I find myself the same; my judgment is firm and accurate, and can make its way in this world so new and topsy-turvy. It is on but one point that my reason wavers—Clementine!—I seem to ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... sense of the emotion behind the utterance is infallible, so infallible that we accept the utterance. By some miracle, which is her secret, the passion gets through. The illusion of reality is so strong that it covers its own lapses. Jane Eyre exists to prove that ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... known the truth. But they are in as great anxiety for the others as for him; so they bore them all away. In every case but one they were misled. But like the man who dreams and takes a fiction for the truth, so the shields cause them to suppose this illusion to be a reality. It is the shields, then, that cause this mistake. [222] Carrying the corpses, they move away and come to their tents, where there was a sorrowing troop. Upon hearing the lament raised by the Greeks, soon all the others gathered, until ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... to be believed—too much like a happy dream to have the stable feeling of reality—She extricated herself from his close and affectionate embrace, and held him at arm's length, to satisfy her mind that it was no illusion. But the form was indisputable—Douce David Deans himself, in his best light-blue Sunday's coat, with broad metal buttons, and waistcoat and breeches of the same, his strong gramashes or leggins of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... it, leaving him only a leper's life. In the Peninsula they had dissembled among Christians; he would dissemble among Jews, aping the ancient apes. He foresaw no difficulty in the recantation. And—famous idea!—his brother Joseph, poor, dear fool, should bring it about under the illusion that he was the instrument of Providence: for to employ Dom Diego as go-between were to risk the scenting of his real motive. Then, when the Synagogue had taken him to its sanctimonious arms, Ianthe—overwhelming thought!—would ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and dangerous illusion to believe that in the present or probable condition of human society a commerce so extensive and so rich as ours could exist and be pursued in safety without the continual support of a military marine—the only arm by which the power of this Confederacy can be estimated ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... brother that the hollow behind the house was haunted by a monstrous and malevolent phantom, to which, in the plenitude of his imagination, he gave the name of Peningre. Gradually the child discovered that Peningre was an illusion, and began to suspect that other ideas of Hurrell's might be illusions too. Superstition is the parent of scepticism from the cradle to the gave. At the same time his own faculty of invention was rather ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenth century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress of its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... highly educated persons, that their superior talents and education will enable them to enjoy more of heaven's happiness than those who either have no great talents or are too poor to have them developed by study. There can be no greater illusion. If it were so, the poor, who, have already suffered so much from their humble position, would seemingly have reason to complain on seeing the educated classes again above them in heaven; and that, too, merely on account of their higher education, ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... such as I have whenever I stand before a certain sixteenth-century portrait in the National Gallery: a sense or an illusion of being in the presence of a living person with whom I am engaged in a wordless conversation, and who is revealing his inmost soul to me. And it is only the work of a genius that can affect you ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... For instance, though Cardinal de Richelieu affected to humble whole bodies and societies, yet he studied to oblige individuals, which is sufficient to give you an idea of all the rest. He had indeed some unaccountable illusions, which he pushed to the utmost extremity. The most dangerous kind of illusion in State affairs is a sort of lethargy that never happens without showing pronounced symptoms. The abolishing of ancient laws, the destruction of that golden medium which was established between the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of their followers, took refuge beyond the frontier, looking forward to the outbreak of war between Austria and France. Their partisans formed a French connection in the interior of the country; and by some strange illusion, the priests themselves and the close corporations which had been attacked by Joseph supposed that their interests would be respected by Revolutionary France. [22] Thus the ground was everywhere prepared for ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... times. She understood very well on the contrary. She knew her brother thoroughly and liked him as he was. Moreover, the scorn and loathing of mankind were the lot of the Jacobin Fouche, who, exploiting for his own advantage every weakness, every virtue, every generous illusion of mankind, made dupes of his whole generation and died ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Voltaire—"Assis dans un fauteuil, avec un livre 'a la main, il jouc les comedies o'u1 il y a sept, huit, dix, douze personnages, si parfaitement bien, qu'on ne saurait croire, m'eme en le regardant, que ce soit le m'eme homme qui Parle. Pour moi, l'illusion est parfaitc."-E. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... illusion perfect, she sought and found an article of dress, of which the Albionic name has been forgotten, but which is known to modern women as a petticoat. It was reddish brown in colour, and, so far, in keeping with the grey ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... been a boat or the shadow of a boat, he could not be sure. In fact, there were moments when he doubted whether it was not some ocular illusion, brought about by too ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... horse-race staged in a theatre, where the horses do indeed run furiously, but where we all know well that they are not getting anywhere. There is a moving floor beneath them, and it is only the shifting of the scenery that makes them seem to go. Is human history like that? Is progress an illusion? Is it all going to end as Bertrand Russell says? Those who believe in the living God are certain of the contrary, for stability amid change is the gift of a progressive, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... wife, who will bury him," replied Georges. "The countess is still fine-looking for a woman of fifty-four years of age. She is very elegant, and, at a little distance, gives one the illusion—" ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... break the silence, "You have explained," I said, "an impression which I have experienced again and again in my visits here, and which has sometimes reached the intensity of an actual illusion, though a very agreeable one. The look of your house, its style, its tone and keeping, carried me two centuries back so completely that I should hardly have been surprised to hear Monsieur le Prince, Madame de la ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... more probable, harassed by persecution, by the hatred of their fellow-creatures directed against them, or by torture, actually confessed themselves guilty. These instances are too numerous, not to constitute an important chapter in the legislation of past ages. And, now that the illusion has in a manner passed away from the face of the earth, we are on that account the better qualified to investigate this error in its causes and consequences, and to look back on the tempest and hurricane from which we have escaped, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... life is the beginning of an illusion to the effect that there is such a thing as free will and that there is such another thing as necessity—the recognition of the fact that there is an "I can" and an "I cannot," an "I may" and an ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... questions and answers which went to destroy the illusion that the murdered man had been universally popular. And for some time after that the trial seemed to go in Paul's favour rather than ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... was conscious of keeping it up, of ministering to an illusion as monstrous as it was absurd. She had married Mr. Ransome, believing with a final and absolute conviction in his wisdom and his goodness. What she was keeping up had kept up for twenty-two years, and would keep up forever, was the attitude of her undying youth. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... the next day in the hotel parlor, she reminded him in her exquisite beauty of a play seen from the back of the stage; the illusion so successful with the audience is there an exposed sham, without coherence, and without beauty. Her eyes had a scared look. She had to say to herself, if this is Horace then my time has come, if it is Arthur Dillon I have nothing to worry about, before her hate came to ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... held at Lima, in 1567, coca was described "as a worthless object, fitted for the misuse and superstition of the Indians;" and a royal decree of October 18, 1569, expressly declares that the notions entertained by the natives that coca gives them strength, is an "illusion of the devil" (una elusion del Demonio). The Peruvian mine owners were the first to discover the importance of the chacchar in assisting the Indians to go through their excessive labor, and they, together with the plantation owners, became ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... house did not belie the national reputation. After dinner, a bright fire blazing, doors and windows shutting out the cold air that whistled along the hills, they struck up in chorus some of the finest national airs, particularly the Hymn to the Rhine—so that it seemed an illusion that we were in this wild, mining district, inhabited only by the poorest Indians; and we were transported thousands of miles off, across the broad Atlantic, even to ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... sister Elizabeth (the biggest child of the lot), absolutely depended on the good sense of Cyrus and his wife, and would have been helpless without them. But, as a matter of education, each child had a secret illusion of superiority to the parental standard, and not only made wild dashes at originality and independent action, but at the same time cherished a perfect mania for regulating and running all the others. Independence ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... barn-like stage, with chairs set about to indicate properties; the stage hands coming and going, the stage manager shouting directions—it was all new to them. The members of the company were as businesslike as bank clerks. No hint of illusion, no scrap of romance! ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... has been a book like 'A Man's World.' ... A novelist of skill and power.... His greatest gift is his power of creating the illusion of reality.... Vividness and conviction unite in the wonderful portrait of Nina.... There never has been such a character in American fiction before.... Nina will be one of the famous twentieth century ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... trenches at Christmas, and in January a semi-official communiqu announced that the French had broken the German offensive and could break the German defensive whenever they chose. This pleasing illusion was maintained, not so much by a censorship of the truth as by incapacity on the part of those in authority to discern it, and by a natural tendency of the wish to be father of the thought. German ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... heart. 'If you meet with an accident,' he said, 'half Edinburgh immediately flocks to your doors to inquire after your pure hand, or your pure foot.' 'Their temper,' he observed, 'stands anything but an attack on their climate; even Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook.' The sharp reviewer stuck to his myrtle allusions, and treated Smith's attempts with as much contempt as if he had been a 'wild visionary, who had never breathed his caller ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... compel the artist to plagiarize against his will. A scrupulous writer, being also as ingenious as Sterne, could have found some means of indicating the source from which he was borrowing without destroying the dramatic illusion of ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... he had suffered from violence of any kind, his head was clear and bright, his limbs felt as elastic and virile as ever. He was like a man who had suddenly awakened from a long sleep; he was just as fresh and vigorous. The bed on which he was lying completed the illusion. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... about as well as your coat fits the chair-back. Strange and curious things in the air, and in the water, and in the earth beneath, are seen every day except by those who are looking for them, namely, the naturalists. When Wilson or Audubon gets his eye on the unknown bird, the illusion vanishes, and your phenomenon turns out to be one of the commonplaces of the ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... but for a moment, the next the blood rallied to her heart, and she told herself that Humfrey would say, that either the state of her spirits had produced an illusion, or else that some child had been left here by accident. She advanced, but as she did so the two hands were stretched out and locked together as in an agony, and the childish, feeble voice cried out, 'Oh! ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... halted, although their efforts still gave an appearance of advance. Thrashing and wrenching they urged themselves and the now burdensome ladder against the invincible wall. The only result was to give the illusion they were burying themselves in the clutching tentacles. Exertions dwindled; the struggle grew less intense; then they retreated, fighting their way out of the enveloping mass in a panic ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... in its mouth; the moon shaped like an eye, a brilliant, glowing, wondrous orb, more intensely golden for its contrast with the ominous blackness of the serpentine cloud. I felt that I had found the origin of the Oriental fable. Some minutes the illusion held, and then the cloud lowered, and the moon, alone against a pale-blue background, the horizon a mass of scudding draperies of pearly hue, lit the ocean between the ship and the edge of the world in a tremulous ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... man who is devoted to Gypsies. The "Athenaeum" reviewer {221b} begs the question by calling the Gypsy dialogues of Hindes Groome, photographic; and is plainly inaccurate in saying that if they are compared with those in "Lavengro" "the illusion in Borrow's narrative is disturbed by the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers." For Borrow's dialogues do produce an effect of some kind of life; those of Hindes Groome instruct us or pique our curiosity, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... between whose mind and my own the point of contact was wanting. Of Henry, for many reasons, I had rather not talk to you. You know that I have never hesitated to tell myself the truth, or to destroy an illusion, which in the secrecy of my heart I have felt to be such; but it requires a courage and a strength which, to-day especially, I do not find in myself, to trace the progress of estrangement in an affection once as intense as a mother's; and which still ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... lifting up his eyes he would have a faint view of the night-hawks, flapping their ominous wings over his devoted head, visible only from the glimmering light of the fire-flies, which he would naturally conclude were sparks from the bottomless pit. Nothing would be wanting at this moment to complete the illusion, but one of those dreadful explosions of thunder and lightning, so extravagantly described by Lee, ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... situation was different. I could conjure up an illusion there—the biggest, most vivid illusion I have been privileged to harbor since I was a small boy. It was worth spending four days in Naples for the sake of spending half a day in Pompeii; and if you know ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... have said, "What a pleasant bucolic-this little surprise party of welcome!" But Howard with his native ear and eye had no such pleasing illusion. He knew too well these suggestions of despair and bitterness. He knew that, like the smile of the slave, this cheerfulness was self-defense; deep down ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... nowhere, and Captain Mercadier, who believed that he had found it at the Cafe Prosper, soon recovered from his illusion. ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... virtuous."—Butler's Analogy, p. 92. "From hence, to such a man, arises naturally a secret satisfaction and sense of security, and implicit hope of somewhat further."—Ib., p. 93. "So much for the third and last cause of illusion that was taken notice of, arising from the abuse of very general and abstract terms, which is the principal source of all the nonsense that hath been vented by metaphysicians, mystagogues, and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Hercules destroying the demons and other mythical heroes was a large alcove, or tokonoma, decorated with peacock, stork, and crane panels. Carvings and lacquer added to the beauty of it. A miniature chrysanthemum garden heightened the illusion. Carved hinoki wood framed the panels, and the roof was supported by columns in the old Japanese style, the whole being a compromise between the very simple and quiet and the polychromatic. The dark woods, the lanterns, the floor tiles of ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... small mirror, where you would expect to see your own. The longer you look upon this marvellous painting, the less possible does it seem that it is merely the placing of color on canvas which causes this perfect illusion. It does not seem possible that you are looking at a plane surface. There is a stratum of air before, behind, and beside these figures. You could walk on that floor and see how the artist is getting on with the portrait. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... must, according to them, be punctual to his hour. In the main, the latter plead a sounder cause than the more lenient critics. For the only ground of the rule is the observation of a probability which they suppose to be necessary for illusion, namely, that the actual time and that of the representation should be the same. If once a discrepancy be allowed, such as the difference between two hours and thirty, we may upon the same principle go much farther. This idea of illusion has occasioned great errors in the theory ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... could Cydaria be to me now? She flew at bigger game. She had flung me a kindly crumb of remembrance; she would think that we were well quit; nay, that I was overpaid for my bruised heart and dissipated illusion. ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... purple valleys of illusion I see her waiting, like the soul of music, With deep eyes, lovelier than cerulean pansies, Shadow and fire, yet merciless as poison; With red lips, sweeter than Arabian storax, Yet bitterer than myrrh.—O tears and kisses! O eyes and lips, that ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... among annuals. For man and woman we are naturally accustomed to a longer rhythm; their metre is so obviously their own, and of but a single stanza, without repetition, without renewel, without refrain. But it is by an intelligible illusion that we look for a quick waxing and waning in the lives of young children—for a waxing that shall come again another time, and for a waning that shall not be final, shall not be fatal. But every winter shows us how human they are, and how ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... if no future state, No blissful retribution mortals wait, If fate's decrees the thinking being doom To lose existence in the silent tomb. All may be well; that hope can man sustain. All now is well; 'tis an illusion vain. The sages held me forth delusive light, Divine instructions only can be right. Humbly I sigh, submissive suffer pain, Nor more the ways ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... Vandalism of Vauban, Cohorn, and those mechanical-pated fellows, who, with their Dutch dyke-looking parapets, made such havoc of donjons and picturesque turrets in Europe. Here is every variety of mediaeval battlement; so perfect is the illusion, that one wonders the waiter's horn should be mute, and the walls devoid of bowman, knight, ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... against the wind, noticeable in many of Browning's later poems. He could not cease from hope; but hope and faith had much to encounter, and sometimes he would reduce the grounds of his hope to the lowest, as if to make sure against illusion and to test the fortitude of hope even at its weakest. The hope of immortality which was his own inevitably extended itself beyond himself, and became an interpreter of the mysteries of our earthly life. In contrast with the ardent ideality of Rabbi Ben Ezra may be set ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... accustomed to the light suddenly shed about her, she was bidden to think of what had happened as only a dream. Her heart refused to make surrender of its hope. Though it could be held only by an encouragement of recognised illusion, she preferred to dream yet a little longer. Above all, she must taste the luxury of forgiving her lover, of making sure that her image would not dwell in his mind as that of a self-righteous woman who had turned coldly from his error, perhaps ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... was an illusion—nothing more. It is useless for me to torment my soul, I have no need ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... were lying down and turning their backs on the flying drift, Wandering William, as he called himself, retired once more. But he couldn't sleep for thinking of the strange illusion he had had. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... untimely voyage. Gideon pled in vain to be allowed to join the party. 'No, Gid,' said his uncle. 'You will be watched; you must keep away from us.' Nor had the barrister ventured to contest this strange illusion; for he feared if he rubbed off any of the romance, that Mr Bloomfield might weary of the whole affair. And his discretion was rewarded; for the Squirradical, laying a heavy hand upon his nephew's ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... might be sorry to be there. They were leaving behind them all the good things, all the pleasant things, of life as, in time of peace, every one of them had learned to live it and to know it. Long, long since had the last illusion faded of the old days when war had seemed a thing of ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... the less of it. Do not imagine that the illusion is, or can be, or ought to be, complete. If it were possible, no Phalaris or Perillus could devise a crueller torture. Here are two imitations: first, the poet's of the sufferer; secondly, the actor's of both: poetry is superinduced. No man in pain ever uttered the better part of ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... Gaultier had constructed an even profounder formula. The "Will-to-Live" of the one and the "Will-to- Power" of the other were, after all, only parts of de Gaultier's supreme generalization, the "Will-to-Illusion." ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... genuine critical point in nature,—a point on which our destiny and that of others might hinge. The whole question of free will concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "Is or is not the appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?" ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... that the vast majority of people in Europe and America are indebted to Dr. Jameson for any knowledge which they may have acquired of the Transvaal and its Uitlander problem. Theirs is a disordered knowledge, and perhaps it is not unnatural that they should in a manner share the illusion of the worthy sailor who, after attending divine service, assaulted the first Israelite he met because he had only just heard of the Crucifixion. A number of worthy people are still disposed to excuse ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... certain one always suffered thus on those feast-days on which he had to receive Communion, his superiors, discovering that there was no fault on his part, ruled that he was not to refrain from communicating on that account, and the demoniacal illusion ceased. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... society, and was weak enough to suppose it possible. The attention of my unassuming instructor, who, without being ignorant of his own powers, possessed great simplicity of manners, strengthened the illusion. Having sometimes caught up hints for thought, from my untutored remarks, he often led me to discuss the subjects he was treating, and would read to me his productions, previous to their publication, wishing to profit by the criticism ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... modern society; from all he wrests something, from these an illusion, from those a hope; from one a catch-word, from another a mask. He ransacked vice, he dissected passion. He searched out and sounded man, soul, heart, entrails, brain,—the abyss that each one has within himself. And by grace of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... credence to the wicked gambols of wizards and witches. Many a poor iniquitous old woman, from some mysterious hints of her power to tell fortunes, or to gratify the revengeful feelings of her neighbours, was put to a cruel death. More enlightened times have dissipated this illusion, and driven these imaginary imps of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to let their bights fall into the sea, the ship slowly drifted astern, and rode by her cables. When this was done, the two young men stood together in silence on the forecastle, as if each felt that all which had just occurred was some illusion. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... deafening, reverberating roar, and Lane clutched at a piece of the rock, and closed his eyes, feeling that all was over, but opened them again directly to see that the bridge before him was not undulating, and he knew that it was an optical illusion due to the heat and the giddiness from which ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... met his gaze, the rich color flushed her soft cheeks and her eyes drooped shyly under their long lashes. Love, with her, had not yet proved an illusion,—a bright toy to be snatched hastily and played with for a brief while, and then thrown aside as broken and worthless. It seemed to her a most marvellous and splendid gift of God, increasing each day in worth and beauty,—widening upon her soul and ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... to show that the unreal could not exist. But, if there is no empty space, it seems impossible that there should be any motion, and the world of which we suppose ourselves to be aware must be an illusion. Such, briefly stated, was the position taken up by another Ionian of southern Italy, Parmenides of Elea (c. 475 B. C.), who had begun as a Pythagorean, but had been led to apply the rigorous method of reasoning introduced ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... temperament, and any one on hearing him narrate would say the same; but it is supposed that, when the captain performed this first solitary excursion, his brain was affected by an excited and highly poetical imagination. After eleven months of solitude, he reached the Pacific Ocean, and awoke from his long illusion in the middle of a people whose language he could not understand; yet they were men of his colour, kind and hospitable; they gave him jewels and gold, and sent him back east of the mountains, under the protection ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... from seriously contemplating and arranging a very different kind of match. Since their father's death she had schooled them into calling her "Edith"; she had also succeeded by means of certain modifications in her appearance, not confined entirely to her raiment and her coiffure, in creating the illusion of thirty; and everything she said and did was calculated to confirm this process of self-deception. She loathed old age. The very breath of an old person in the room in which she sat was enough to oppress and stifle her. It always struck her that the bitter smell of corpses was not ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... different and changed when it passes through a woman's ears. And though you reverse the sexual polarity, the flow between the sexes, still the difference is the same. The apparent mutual understanding, in companionship between a man and a woman, is always an illusion, and always breaks down in ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... wind, sometimes with his grey eyes intently following the track, reminded me of those famous Cossacks that I had seen pass through Germany when I was a boy; and his tall, lanky horse, muscular and full-maned, its body as slender as a greyhound's, completed the illusion. ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... as a perversion of the judgment, a chimerical thought; an illusion, an incorrect impression of the senses, counterfeit appearances; hence we speak of a delusion of the mind, an illusion of the senses. Lawyers lay great stress on the presence of delusions as indicative of insanity. An hallucination is a sensation which is supposed by the patient to be produced by external impressions, although ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... the voice of M. Alexandre Ribot, the veteran minister of finance, who, having Verdun before his eyes, told the Chamber of Deputies: "We have reached the decisive hour. We can say without exaggeration, without illusion, and without vain optimism, that we now see the end of ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... quite dark when the curtain goes up, and turn up a lamp very slowly behind the scene, so that it shines on my face. A lamp being turned up very slowly is wonderfully effective. It produces a perfect illusion. Could you manage that with one hand and play the music of the awakening ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... have come over to try and reason with this bunch of nuts. Don't you know they are so damn conceited that if you were to tell them that every time you look at a German you see two men, they would believe you; and then as if they hated to lie to themselves, they would say perhaps it was an optical illusion. Tell them that God did not create anyone but the Germans and that he left the rest of the world to the students in his office, and they will give you a smile of assent." Edestone smiled indulgently. "Tell them that when the Kaiser frowns every wheel in the United States stops and refuses to move ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... I am about to relate will be interpreted in a different manner by different people. Rationalists who pin their faith on Sir Walter Scott and his "Demonology" will say it was only an optical illusion; the incredulous, who believe in nothing, will declare it was but a dream; while Spiritualists, who follow Mr. Robert Dale Owen in his "Footprints on the Boundaries of Another World," will be ready to declare that it was the apparition ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... giant about to make an attack upon you with an enormous club. You walk forward to confront the monster with perfect coolness. Why? Not because you are a Mr Greatheart, accustomed to deal with giants, but because, in fact, the illusion does not keep possession of your mind even for a moment. Imagination merely suggests the false image; but memory and reason, with a rapidity of action which cannot be described, instantly correct the mistake, and tell you it is only ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... landed on the sands of Massachusetts Bay. The illusion was gone,—the ignis-fatuus of adventure, the dream of wealth. The rugged wilderness offered only a stern and hard-won independence. In their own hearts, not in the promptings of a great leader or the patronage of an equivocal government, their enterprise found its birth and its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Feet turned, and his large, dark eyes rested without expression upon the face of the Swede. He seemed almost literally to fold his hands and await the result of his trial. The illusion was so complete that even Riley Sinclair began to feel that the prisoner might be guilty—of an act which he himself had done! The opportunity was indeed too perfect to be dismissed without consideration. It was in his power definitely to put the blame on another man; then he could remain in ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... choice of being, When the sap begins to climb,— Strong insistence, sweet intrusion, Vasts and verges of illusion,— So I win, to time's confusion, The one perfect pearl of time, Joy and joy and joy forever, Till the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... they do; during the representation of the fable, but we love, or hate them for what they have done before their appearance; and we dread, or warmly expect the consequences of their resolutions after they depart the stage. The illusion would not be sufficiently strong, if we did not suppose the dramatic persons equally accountable to the powers above us, as we are ourselves. This Shakespear has taken care forcibly to impress upon his audience, in making the ghost of the murthered king of Denmark, charge his son not ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... We thought, at first sight, that these luminous points, which floated in the air, indicated some new eruption of the great volcano of Lancerota; for we recollected that Bouguer and La Condamine, in scaling the volcano of Pichincha, were witnesses of the eruption of Cotopaxi. But the illusion soon ceased, and we found that the luminous points were the images of several stars magnified by the vapours. These images remained motionless at intervals, they then seemed to rise perpendicularly, descended sideways, and returned to the point whence they had departed. This motion ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... transient brass And purify and fine it that it be Worthy God's altar. My beloved friend, Such was your trial; thus have I tempted you With things averse to God, with forms and faiths Outcast and separate from Him. You have seen The whole world's vanities; you have come to know That in this world's illusion is no power Whose love is refuge: even the living death Of cold Nirvana frights you. Thus at last, Knowing that you are powerless, and the world Bare of salvation for your feebleness, You stand on this great threshold; and your eyes That see despair and loneliness shall raise Their ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... that all the planets had moved further from each other, that all objects around us had become larger, that we ourselves had become taller, and that the distance travelled by light in the duration of a vibration had become greater, we should not hesitate to think ourselves the victims of an illusion, that in reality all these distances had remained fixed, and that all these appearances were due to a shortening of the rule which we had used as the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... violent fusillade greeted it. There was firing from the streets, windows, courts and roofs. I followed it through my field glass, and for a moment I thought it had been hit, for it paused in its flight. But this was an optical illusion.... The plane simply flew higher, having without doubt heard the sound of the fusillade and the bullets having perhaps whistled too close to the pilot's ears. When he was almost over my post, a light white cloud appeared under its ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... unionism. To secure for the workers advances of wages, which economic conditions justify, sooner than would otherwise have been obtained, is certainly no trivial or contemptible function. But it is none the less an illusion to suppose that the general wage-level can be appreciably and permanently raised by trade union action, except in so far as it increases the efficiency of the workers or incidentally stimulates the ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... we consider to be erroneous and misleading, and a perversion of the original Yogi teachings. This false teaching has taken possession of many of the Hindu teachers and people, and with its accompanying teaching of "Maya" or the complete illusion or non-existence of the Universe, has reduced millions of people to a passive, negative mental condition which undoubtedly is retarding their progress. Not only in India is this true, but the same facts may be observed among the pupils of the Western teachers ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... respects satisfactory. The States General were in the best temper; the troops, the provisions and the magazines were in the best order. Every thing was in readiness for an early campaign. William received the intelligence with the calmness of a man whose work was done. He was under no illusion as to his danger. "I am fast drawing," he said, "to my end." His end was worthy of his life. His intellect was not for a moment clouded. His fortitude was the more admirable because he was not willing to die. He had very lately said to one of those whom he most loved: "You know that I never ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... kind cannot arise without a divine fiat.' Doctor Hibbert adds in a note—'A short time before the vision, Colonel Gardiner had received a severe fall from his horse. Did the brain receive some slight degree of injury from the accident, so as to predispose him to this spiritual illusion?'—Hibbert's Philosophy of Apparitions, Edinburgh, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... business, usually do little more than procure a good comfortable living, with incidental education, to those who engage in them. That the majority of the inhabitants of Southern California will become rich by the culture of the orange and the vine is an illusion; but it is not an illusion that twenty times its present population can live there in comfort, in what might be called luxury elsewhere, by the cultivation of the soil, all far removed from poverty and much above the condition of the majority of the inhabitants ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... that in those days we had no Cavalry opponent to encounter, and that our sphere of action, owing to the want on our side of an adequate equipment of firearms, was small indeed in comparison with what we must expect in the future. We are encouraged in our illusion by the fact that in our Peace manoeuvres the strength of the opposing forces is generally nearly equal, and also because the actual demands War will make upon the Arm are still in these exercises very ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... the endless cycle of disease and misery would cease, and a new dawn of hope burst with blinding radiance upon weary humanity. And then a mood of unbelief would darken my mind and I would view the creation of the bacillus as an idle and vain dream, an illusion never to be realized.... ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... the expanse of yellow broadened as luncheon went on. Perhaps it actually did. Perhaps an atmosphere of illusion was created by the port which followed an excellent bottle of sauterne. Yellow is a cheerful colour, and Sir Bartholomew's waistcoat increased the vague feeling of hopeful well-being ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... and between meal-times the Joy liked to spread her toys on it. She wore her hair cut in the Dutch fashion, and sometimes at the end of the day, as I sat by the waning embers and watched her moving to and fro between me and the fading autumn fields, I had the most precious twilight illusion of having stepped backward at least ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... happy are they for whom night exists, near whom people are shouting, making noise, beating drums; who may sit on a chair, with their feet hanging down, or lie with their feet outstretched, placing the head in a corner and covering it with the hands in order to create the illusion of darkness. ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev |
