After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.
Safety is an illusion, and trying to protect ourselves does nothing more than protect us from experiencing a full, evolved, and juicy life.
The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture.
The fact that television and tourism have made the whole world accessible has created the illusion that we enjoy intimate knowledge of other places, when we barely scratch their surface. For the vast majority, the knowledge of Thailand or Sri Lanka acquired through tourism consists of little more than the whereabouts of the beach.
'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
This illusion that a lower class has less intelligence than a higher class is a complete fake-out.
A change in external circumstances without inner renewal is a materialist's illusion, as though man were only a product of his social circumstance and nothing else.
The secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is to give the other side the illusion of control. Don't try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Ask questions, that begin with 'How?' or 'What?' so your opponent uses mental energy to figure out the answer.
Mindfulness is a quality that's always there. It's an illusion that there's a meditation and post-meditation period, which I always find amusing, because you're either mindful or you're not.
Do not be misled by what you see around you, or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideals. But you are not part of that world.
We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
The secret to film is that it's an illusion.
What it turns out is that we think we're multitasking, but we're not. The brain is sequential tasking: we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we're doing is doing all these things at once.
Not knowing whom to fall in love with is like not knowing which film to make next. Life is pretty chaotic; it's just an illusion that one has control over one's life.
At the end of the 1960s, I was part of the downtown theatrical movement in New York that was making work in alleyways, garages, gyms, churches, non-traditional spaces. The idea was to get away from the illusion of the conventional theatre. But then I thought, what's wrong with illusion?
I've never really had a waist. Even when I was at my slimmest, my silhouette was very straight up, straight down. But I have learnt how to give myself a bit of waist by optical illusion. For this, bring on the belts.
It's almost like an optical illusion, 'The Hobbit.' You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.
There is no cure for ugly, but you can make yourself into a human optical illusion.