Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face
Context: By what right does carnal love say, "I am your hearts and minds as well, and we are indissoluble, and I sweep all along with my strokes of glory and defeat; I am Love!"? It is not true, it is not true. Only by violence does it seize the whole of thought; and the poets and lovers, equally ignorant and dazzled, dress it up in a grandeur and profundity which it has not. The heart is strong and beautiful, but it is mad and it is a liar. Moist lips in transfigured faces murmur, "It's grand to be mad!" No, you do not elevate aberration into an ideal, and illusion is always a stain, whatever the name you lend it.
“Fear best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.”
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H.P. Lovecraft 203
American author 1890–1937Related quotes
“The illusion of free will… is itself an illusion.”
Sam Harris at Sydney Opera House Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2012, Discussion on Free Will http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM3raA1EwrI.
2010s
Context: The illusion of free will... is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. Thoughts and intentions simply arise. What else could they do? Now, some of you might think this sounds depressing, but it's actually incredibly freeing to see life this way. It does take something away from life: what it takes away from life is an egocentric view of life. We're not truly separate: we are linked to one another, we are linked to the world, we are linked to our past, and to history. And what we do actually matters because of that linkage, because of the permeability, because of the fact that we can't be the true locus of responsibility. That's what makes it all matter.
1960s, Review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man", 1961
“The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.”
On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (1986)
“Was not the arbitrary distinction between illusion and reality the ultimate illusion itself?”
Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 13 (p. 164)
“Limits, like fears, are often just an illusion”
Hall of Fame induction address, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf3PYecdgjE&NR=1
“You must not fear death, my lads; defy him, and you drive him into the enemy's ranks.”
As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by Rev. James Wood, p. 567
Attributed
“Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbours. ”
Locus interview (1998)
Context: To my mind, the expression of divinity is in variety, and the more variable the creation, the more variable the creatures that surround us, botanical and zoological, the more chance we have to learn and to see into life itself, nature itself. If we were just human beings, living in a spaceship, with an algae farm to give us food, we would not be moved to learn nearly as many things as we are moved by living on a world, surrounded by all kinds of variety. And when I see that variety being first decimated, and then halved — and I imagine in another hundred years it may be down by 90% and there'll be only 10% of what we had when I was a child — that makes me very sad, and very despairing, because we need variety. We came from that, we were born from that, it's our world, the world in which we became what we have become.