William Wilberforce Quotes

People often put me in a V-neck tennis club sweater, driving a Bentley, but my life wasn't like that.

The grass is always greener on the other side - until you get there and see it's AstroTurf. Symbols are never reality. Someone might have amassed material success and fame, but that doesn't mean they're happy. So, don't go judging a person's life by the cover.

A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.

I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn't mind. The world makes liars of us all.

People are distracted by objects of desire, and afterwards repent of the lust they've indulged, because they have indulged with a phantom and are left even farther from Reality than before. Your desire for the illusory is a wing, by means of which a seeker might ascend to Reality. When you have indulged a lust, your wing drops off; you become lame and that fantasy flees. Preserve the wing and don't indulge such lust, so that the wing of desire may bear you to Paradise. People fancy they are enjoying themselves, but they are really tearing out their wings for the sake of an illusion.

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

False fancy brings real misery.

Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.

Although, of course, my definition of evil is not everybody else's. Evil is being involved in the glamour and charm of material existence, glamour in its old Gaelic sense meaning enchantment with the look of things, rather than the soul of things.

Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but...

I played with the image, because I think image is temporary. It's a projection. It's illusory.

This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .

We always have a tendency to see those things that do not exist and to be blind to the great lessons that are right there before our eyes.

I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.

Life is the art of being well deceived.

Life is a publicity stunt. A shill. You've been had.

And what is friendship but a name, A charm that lulls to sleep, A shade that follows wealth or fame, And leaves the wretch to weep?

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

All, as they say, that glitters is not gold.

You don't want no pie in the sky when you die, You want something here on the ground while you're still around.

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.

While we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from year to year, from day to day.

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us.