The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.

One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.

[92] Cause and effect. It is then true to say that everyone is the victim of illusion, because the ordinary person’s opinions are sound without being intellectually so, for he believes truth to be where it is not. There is certainly some truth in these opinions, but not as much as people imagine. It is true that we should honour the gentry but not because gentle birth is a real advantage.

There is no cure for illusions. There is only the opportunity for discovery.

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.

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course — for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.

Life is illusion, disillusionment is destruction.

The one thing that is more dangerous than true ignorance is the illusion of understanding.

There is no cure for illusion. There is only the opportunity for discovery.

In the long run it is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the actual fact is.

when we start to deeply believe in an illusion, it becomes a delusion.

This deficiency in our ideas is not, indeed, perceived in common life, nor are we sensible, that in the most usual conjunctions of cause and effect we are as ignorant of the ultimate principle, which binds them together, as in the most unusual and extraordinary. But this proceeds merely from an illusion of the imagination; and the question is, how far we ought to yield to these illusions. This question is very difficult, and reduces us to a very dangerous dilemma, whichever way we answer it. For if we assent to every trivial suggestion of the fancy; beside that these suggestions are often contrary to each other; they lead us into such errors, absurdities, and obscurities, that we must at last become asham'd of our credulity. Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compar'd to those angels, whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings. This has already appear'd in so many instances, that we may spare ourselves the trouble of enlarging upon it any farther.

But illusions die hard, and the brighter they are the longer they take adying.