Quotes About Illusion

I feel a connection to the work of the Pictures artists. We have a shared interest in common, everyday images and how they shape reality. But I understand this shared interest as something more than media critique. There's an uncanny emptiness lurking beneath the surface of every glossy image. For me, the legacy of the Pictures Generation is a desire to disrupt the surface illusion of reality and to access another dimension.

It is too clear and so it is hard to see. A dunce once searched for a fire with a lighted lantern. Had he known what fire was, He could have cooked his rice much sooner.

Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.

Men delude themselves into thinking that the events in which they participate are of particular significance to history, but they rarely are. One empire is the same as another.

Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive.

Getting older is a question of coming to terms with the fact that you'll never know the secrets; and the resulting equilibrium is what gives the illusion of actually knowing them.

All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

people can die of mere imagination - Geffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.

Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in what is not a relief from what is. Now the real, now illusion is our refuge; and the soul has finally no other resource but the true, which is her weapon -- and falsehood, which is her armor.

Life blackens at the contact of truth.

Kimi zaman penceredeki manzara, duvara as?lm?? bir tablodur yaln?zca; kimi zaman oda, orada olmam? de?il, bütünü görmemi engelleyen, a?açlar aras?nda bir kabuktan ba?ka bir ?ey de?ildir.

Il y a des personnages qui sentent que leurs sens les séparent du réel, de l'être. Ce sens en eux infecte les autres sens.

Der Mensch lebt und stirbt in dem, was er sieht, aber er sieht nur was er träumt.

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

It would take a while before the postmodern Narcissus perceived the ruins of society behind the emptiness of his mirror.

It could be that you have the wrong hands, or the wrong face. It is not your imagination. You do. You have. It is emerging as the condition of our age. Every day there are new ways of being wrong. Explosions are common, but that is not it. We are waking up to it. We are opening our wrong eyes.

There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.

There was only today to throw yourself into without thinking about tomorrow, let alone forever. To keep you from thinking, there was liquor, an ocean's worth at least, all the usual vices and plenty of rope to hang yourself with. Love is a beautiful liar.

He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, the tip flaring an angry red. "Isn't love a beautiful goddamn liar?

you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off the chrome handlebars—one, two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself.

Isn't love a beautiful goddamn liar?

Love is a beautiful liar? Beauty was a liar too.

but none of it was real any more. We lived on a ghost farm.