Quotes About Phantoms

A city of harelipped ghosts

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony.

Have we not seen many times indeed human beings who, poor and naked, prostrate themselves before all the phantoms of fear, and rather than follow the teaching of well-disposed demons, obey the commandments of cruel demiurges?

We chase dreams and embrace shadows.

I see the state of all of us who live, nothing more than phantoms or a weightless shadow.

Here the clouds constantly adjusted like obedient phantoms, so that shadows never lengthened or shortened. At any point in space, Limbo never became any darker or lighter than the moment before.

We all carry many selves, but in the end, these are just phantoms of possibility, nothing more than ghosts of broken destinies.

Mamma, are they demons? Is it the Wild Hunt? Phantoms from hell? Mamma, mamma! Quiet, quiet, children. They are not demons, not devils . . . Worse than that. They are people.

They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other's phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of pleasures but, connoisseurs of unreality as they were, they could not bear the crude weight, the rank smell and the ripe taste of real flesh. It is always a dangerous experiment to act out a fantasy; they had undertaken the experiment rashly and had failed…

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

Not only are there before and after, but there are also beginnings and returns. Not only is there the creation of the humans, formed of corn or clay, with a breath of wind or a god, but there are mythic destinies. Sometimes myth is formed by the body and what happens to it, especially in the realm of pain, depth, and birth. Phantoms of generations past are in our bodies. These explain us to ourselves.

If people have ghosts, then why shouldn't other things have them? What makes us so special that only we can have ghosts?

Standing there, I had the feeling of putting on armour, taking up secret weapons, becoming like a dreamer, invulnerable for the moment—safe in my dream. Now I could face the world, having no part in life; the presence of waiting phantoms could be forgotten. I was outside everything, surrendered unconditionally to my dream, giving no thought to my next move, prepared to obey whatever impulse next reaches me from the unseen.

There is no body or truth we possess, nor even any illusion. We are phantoms made of lies. Shadows of illusions, our lives are hollow on both the outside and the inside.

The music, once admitted to the soul, becomes also a sort of spirit, and never dies. It wanders perturbedly through the halls and galleries of the memory, and is often heard again, distinct and living as when it first displaced the wavelets of the air. Now at times, then, these phantoms of sound floated back upon her fancy; if gay, to call a smile from every dimple; if mournful, to throw a shade upon her brow, — to make her cease from her childishmirth, and sit apart and muse.

Even memories have their youth … When you let them grow old, they turn into revolting phantoms dripping with selfishness, vanity, and lies … They rot like apples

Who knows why man, however beset his chance by lies, has been offered love? Yet it had to be faced, down, down he had gone, down till—it was not the bottom even now, he realised. It was not the end quite yet. It was as if his fall had been broken by a narrow ledge, a ledge from which he could neither climb up nor down, on which he lay bloody and half stunned, while far below him the abyss yawned, waiting. And on it as he lay he was surrounded in delirium by these phantoms of himself.

Wilhelm, what is the world to our hearts without love? What is a magic-lantern without light? You have but to kindle the flame within, and the brightest figures shine on the white wall; and, if love only show us fleeting shadows, we are yet happy, when, like mere children, we behold them, and are transported with the splendid phantoms.

the living voice of God does not sound, pomp and ceremony, however elaborately observed, are like empty phantoms. So, we should see that papacy is so much wind.

I see ghosts all the time, all the time.

Engelbert Humperdinck

I don't like ghosts.

They may be dreams of the feverish mind. They may be phantoms wrapped in the garments of memory.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - he hath awakened from the dream of life - 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.