Quotes About Illusion

Adesso poteva anche fare certe cose. Prima del 3 novembre sarebbe stato inconcepibile, ma il mondo irreale era molto più grande di quello reale, e c'era spazio abbondante per essere e non essere se stessi.

For what does it mean to look at something, a real object in the real world, an animal, for example, and say that it is something other than what it is? It is to say that each thing leads a double life, at once in the world and in our minds, and that to deny either one of these lives is to kill the thing in both its lives at once.

Bu adam hiç kimse de?ilse mutlaka Fanshawe'dur.

Put something in the wrong place, and even though it is still there—quite possibly smack under your nose—it can vanish for the rest of time.

I sit in a thickly padded char that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks.

That like the pigs, we all have our heads in the trough. While the hogs don't believe in God, the American dream, or the pen being mightier than the sword, they do believe in the feed in the same desperate way we believe in the Sunday paper, the Bible, black urban radio, and hot sauce. On

He wants to believe that Shakespeare wrote all those books, that Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and the United States fought World War II to rescue the Jews and keep the world safe for democracy, that Jesus and the double feature are coming back. But I'm no Panglossian American.

I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn't quite as comfortable as it looks.

If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.

Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

I believe this in part because of Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

the most common pleasures involve experiences that don't really exist, as when we read novels, go to movies, play video games, and daydream. They are pleasures of the imagination. This is how we spend most of our time—Netflix without the chill.

Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.

When we see the brain we realize that we are, at one level, no more than meat; and, on another, no more than fiction.

Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves-- autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, what then?

The source of wisdom and power, of love and beauty, is within ourselves, but not within our egos. It is within our consciousness. Indeed, its presence provides us with a conscious contrast which enables us to speak of the ego as if it were something different and apart: it is the true Self whereas the ego is only an illusion of the mind.

we are now as divine as we ever shall be—but we must wake up from illusion and see this truth.

True enough, the idea of a personal Devil is as imaginary as a fairy, or an elf, or a hobgoblin;

Yes, me, I prefer the hourglass so you can smash it when I tell you of eternity's lie —Paul Celan, "[Blinded by giant leaps]," Romanian Poems (Green Integer, 2003)

Ich kenne dich, du bist die tief Gebeugte, ich, der Durchbohrte, bin dir untertan. Wo flammt ein Wort, das für uns beide zeugte? Du—ganz, ganz wirklich. Ich—ganz Wahn.)

Suffering causes us to scan our lives and face the fact that we control very little. So we mourn not only our suffering but also what it has forced us to admit about ourselves. Our loss of the illusion of control also adds to the fear that accompanies suffering.

One of the most dangerous delusions for each of us is the delusion of our own sovereignty. And one of our most dangerous idols is the idol of control.

No one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day.

Is that a knife in his hand or an ice cream cone? You'll never know until you taste it.