Experience - the shroud of illusions. [ De Finod ]
Most terrors are but spectral illusions. [ A. Helps ]
Illusions ruin all those whom they blind. [ E. de Girardin ]
How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams
With its illusions, aspirations, dreams!
Book of Beginnings, Story without End,
Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend! [ Longfellow ]
Reason may cure illusions, but not suffering. [ Alfred de Musset ]
The loss of illusions is the death of the soul. [ Chamfort ]
Human reason may cure illusions, but it cannot cure sufferings. [ A. de Musset ]
Truth is too simple for us; we do not like those who unmask our illusions. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Better to know the darker sides of life, than to slumber in dangerous illusions. [ De Finod ]
It is sweet to die young! It is sweet to render to God a life still full of illusions! [ A. Chenier ]
There are some illusions that are like the light of the day: when lost, everything disappears with them. [ Mme. Dufresnoy ]
One of the most seductive illusions of love is to imagine that we contribute to the happiness of those we love. [ Bernardin de St. Pierre ]
An enduring fame is one stamped by the judgment of the future, - that future which dispels illusions, and smashes idols into dust. [ Gladstone ]
Sweet pliability of man's spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions which cheat expectation and sorrow of their weary moments! [ Sterne ]
Our illusions fall one after the other like the parings of fruit: the fruit is experience; its savor may be bitter, still it contains something that strengthens. [ G. de Nerval ]
Virginity of the heart, alas! so soon ravished! sweet dreams! expectations of happiness' and of love! fresh illusions of the morning of life! why do you not last till the end of the day! [ Gavarni ]
At the age when the faculties droop, when stern experience has destroyed all sweet illusions, man may seek solitude; but, at twenty, the affections which he is compelled to repress are a tomb in which he buries himself alive. [ E. de Girardin ]
True, the poisonous breath of the world destroys our illusions, but they resuscitate at once when a ray of love falls upon our benumbed hearts, as the warmth of the sun revives the poor flowers withered by the ices of winter. [ De Finod ]
One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. [ Emerson ]
Error soon passes away, unless upheld by restraint on thought. History tells us (and the lesson is invaluable) that the physical force which has put down free inquiry has been the main bulwark of the superstitions and illusions of past ages. [ Channing ]
Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses? [ Bulwer-Lytton ]
To continue love in marriage is a science. It requires so little to kill those sweet emotions, those precious illusions, which form the charm of life; and it is so difficult to maintain a man at the height on which an exalted passion has placed him, especially when that man is one's husband! [ Mme. Reybaud ]
One is more honest in youth, and to the age of thirty years, than when one has passed it. It is only after that age that one's illusions are dispelled. Until then, one resembles the dog that defends the dinner of his master against other dogs: after this period, he takes his share of it with the others. [ Chamfort ]