It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indef...
The recognition of his carelessness filled Mr. Lecky with fear and anger. In the dusk his eerie heart could anticipate the hours of terror which he had laid up for himself. Sounds, real or imaginary, the silences and secrets of the night, the working...
In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing conservatism but a form...
One vital aspect in the Path toward Clear Awareness is the beginning of differentiation between belief-induced appearance and Reality. In many ways I can illustrate illusions and point out artificial concepts that are commonly accepted as real, but t...
I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence stillborn there. To understand ...
And when I fall in love,” I began, "I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both worlds, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact. And the ...
He's pressing me to his chest. I melt. Oh, this is where I want to be I rest my head against him, and he kisses my hair repeatedly. This is home. He smells of linen, fabric softener, body wash, and my favourite smell - Christian. For a moment, I allo...
Environmentalists generally object to battery-powered devices and for good reason: batteries require mined minerals, employ manufacturing processes that leak toxins into local ecosystems and leave behind an even-worse trail of side effects upon dispo...
It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the...
(...) the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a perm...
What a nuisance is the friend who must have this and that, whose likes and hates are infinite, with bitter and loud voiced complaint about the whole of circumstance? How pleasant are the truly great who, wanting nothing, are content with anything. Ac...
Culture always tells you to look to illusions for answers. ‘Look at me’, it says, ‘I’ve worked it all out’. Celebrities grow too powerful because people mistake their colour for content. They allow them to create a hole at the heart of our ...
The lack of insight to reality, life and history as well as into God's ways, or sunan in His creation, some people will continue to seek or demand the impossible. They will imagine what does not or cannot happen, misunderstand occurrences and events,...
I don't dislike them, nor do I like them. I've never understood why one must love children simply because they are children. I don't love people because they are people; in fact, I rarely like any people at all. If a child is somehow deserving of adm...
The sudden halt of all touches and movements made Lorenz look up. “Vha…whas ist…What’s wrong?” Lorenz stammered, trying to focus so he could speak properly. Cyrus blinked his eyes. “Hmm? Nothing’s wrong. I’m just admiring how beautifu...
Both Lorenz’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead. “The island? Are ju suggesting that the island is alive?” The vampire shrugged. “I don’t know. I do feel something here. It’s almost like a vampire presence but something else as well. It’...
But one creature said at last, "I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.
In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men's minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of th...
God's revelation... unmasks our illusions about ourselves. It exposes our pride, our individualism, our self-centeredness - in short, our sin. But worship also offers forgiveness, healing, transformation, motivation, and courage to work in the world ...
As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipate...
No man engaged in a work he does not like can preserve many saving illusions about himself. The distaste, the absence of glamour, extend from the occupation to the personality. It is only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey...
