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Posts Tagged ‘Illusions’

How #47:DonTheWannaBeDictator Treats Opposition And Friends

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 2, 2025| Leave a Comment »

The idea of painless, nonthreatening coercion is an illusion.  Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence.  If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want.  You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment.  Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on;  or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape.
  ―     John C. Holt
From:  “How Children Fail“
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Click here (2 December) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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Superstition And Illusion

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Security is mostly a superstition.  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
    —     Helen Keller
[I’ve always felt “security” – personal, financial and data – is an illusion.  You are never 100% secure.  You are only as secure as the amount you are willing to pay for the feeling of being secure and the amount you feel someone else is willing to pay to make you feel insecure.    —    kmab]
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Click here (13 February) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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It’s Life’s Illusions I Recall

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , on January 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Don’t part with your illusions.  When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
   —     Mark Twain
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Click here (5 January) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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Seeking To Acquire The Illusion

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , on December 14, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Those who are awed by their surroundings do not think of change, no matter how miserable their condition.  When our mode of life is so precarious as to make it patent that we cannot control the circumstances of our existence, we tend to stick to the proven and the familiar.  We counteract a deep feeling of insecurity by making of our existence a fixed routine.  We hereby acquire the illusion that we have tamed the unpredictable.
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It is a dangerous life we live when hunger and cold are at our heels.  There is thus a conservatism of the destitute as profound as the conservatism of the privileged, and the former is as much a factor in the perpetuation of a social order as the latter.
    —    Eric Hoffer
From his book:  “The True Believer:  Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements“
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Click here (14 December) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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An Equally Urgent Conclusion

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , on September 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living.  I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying).  I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
    —     Albert Camus
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Click here (5 September) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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Smoldering Or Burning?

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »

It’s easy to be a naive idealist.  It’s easy to be a cynical realist.  It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.
    —     Marie-Louise von Franz
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Click here (28 May) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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The Heart Of Science

Posted in Environment, Philosophy, Quotes, Science and Learning, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 18, 2021| Leave a Comment »

We have found that scientific laws pervade all of nature, that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skies, that we can find a resonance, a harmony, between the way we think and the way the world works…
As a boy Kepler had been captured by a vision of cosmic splendor, a harmony of the worlds which he sought so tirelessly all his life.  Harmony in this world eluded him.  His three laws of planetary motion represent, we now know, a real harmony of the worlds, but to Kepler they were only incidental to his quest for a cosmic system based on the Perfect Solids, a system which, it turns out, existed only in his mind.  Yet from his work, we have found that scientific laws pervade all of nature, that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skies, that we can find a resonance, a harmony, between the way we think and the way the world works.
When he found that his long cherished beliefs did not agree with the most precise observations, he accepted the uncomfortable facts, he preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions.  That is the heart of science.
    —    Carl Sagan
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Click here (18 April) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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Haunting Illusions

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, tagged , , , , , , on February 9, 2020| Leave a Comment »

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.  We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
   —    Daniel J. Boorstin
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Click here (9 February) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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All Foam And All Dreams

Posted in Other Blogs, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on February 3, 2020| Leave a Comment »

Oh how smoothly, how swiftly and horribly, how cruelly and thoroughly, one discovers the powers and prowess of Maya, the Supreme Power of Illusions!  With a simple sleight of her hand, léger de main, everything changes in a moment; electrically charged, exciting years of life shrink to moments – just to realize that all that fascinating reality had been a dream.  Perhaps all that happened before had been a continuous sequence of beautiful images that one would admire and fall in love with, only to realize at the end that it’s all a game of dreams, illusions and Maya.  The reality also strikes, at the same moment, that everything one would still experience in the future, would see with one’s eyes and feel with one’s hands, up to the moment of one’s death — that everything is not going to be any different in substance, or any different in kind.  Why should it be?  It’s always been all a game, all foam and all dreams.  It’s Maya, the lovely and frightful, delicious and desperate kaleidoscope of life with its searing delights, intertwined with its searing sorrows, the amazing show that has been ongoing since the dawn of Universe.
   —   Deodatta V. Shenai-Khatkhate
Originally found at:  https://dshenai.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/illusions-of-maya/
[I followed this blog for a couple of years.  Unfortunately, it is now a “private” site on WordPress.  Our loss…    —    kmab]
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Click here (3 February) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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And Yet, I Believe

Posted in Faith, Faith Family and Friends, Quotes, tagged , , , , , on July 28, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
     —     Sigmund Freud
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Click here (28 July) to see the posts of prior years.  I started this blog in late 2009.  Daily posting began in late January 2011.  Not all of the days in the early years (2009-2010) will have posts.

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