We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

Our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination than in reality.

- Seneca

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

- Lillian Hellman

The contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.

- Francis Bacon

Take care, your worship, those things over there are not giants but windmills.

- Miguel de Cervantes

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

- W. Somerset Maugham

All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't.

- George Bernard Shaw

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.

- Carlos Castaneda

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone [from Never Eat Alone]

- Margaret J. Wheatley

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

- Antonio Gramsci

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be.

- Saul Alinsky

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

- Albert Einstein

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

- John D. Rockefeller

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

- Carl Sagan

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

- Albert Camus

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

- Jean Cocteau

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

- Aldous Huxley

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

- Rabindranath Tagore

For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.

- Donald Williams

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

- Anne Sexton

What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

- Bertrand Russell

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all.

- Joni Mitchell