Quotes About Illusion

The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.

It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.

The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior to them. This false difference is already the mimetic illusion of modern individualism, which represents the greatest resistance to the mimetic truth that is re-enacted again and again in human relations. The paradox is that the resistance itself brings about the reenactment. PILATE

The self-proclaimed advocate of impartiality does not want to commit himself to either course of action. If pushed toward one camp, he seeks refuge in the other. Men always find it distasteful to admit that the "reasons" on both sides of a dispute are equally valid—which is to say that violence operates without reason. Tragedy begins at that point where the illusion of impartiality, as well as the illusions of the adversaries, collapses.

It would be wrong to believe that the deceivers at this game are sharply separated from the deceived, that the world is neatly divided between the cold calculators and the innocent dupes. Everybody is a little of both; you must be a dupe of your own comedy to play it with conviction. The romantic and satanic vision of the cold calculator, of the totally lucid manipulator of other people's desires, is a more sophisticated version of the narcissistic illusion.

Ogni mediazione proietta un suo miraggio; i miraggi si susseguono come altrettante "verità" che subentrino alle verità anteriori come una vera e propria uccisione del ricordo vivente e si proteggano dalle verità future con una censura implacabile dell'esperienza quotidiana. Marcel Proust chiama "Io" i "mondi" proiettati dalle successive mediazioni. Gli Io sono perfettamente isolati gli uni dagli altri, incapaci di rammentarsi degli Io passati o di presagire gli Io futuri.

Kahraman, gururun aldat?c? ilah?ndan vazgeçerek kölelikten kurtulur ve sonunda mutsuzlu?un hakikatine eri?ir. Bu vazgeçi?, yarat?c? vazgeçi?ten ay?rt edilemez. Romant?ik bir yazar? gerçek romanc? yapan metafizik arzuyu yenmesidir.

We feel that we are at the point of attaining autonomy as we imitate our models of power and prestige. This autonomy, however, is really nothing but a reflection of the illusions projected by our admiration for them. The more this admiration mimetically intensifies, the less aware it is of its own mimetic nature. The more "proud" and "egotistic" we are, the more enslaved we become to our mimetic models.

Even in the most closed cultures men believe that they are free and open to the universal; their differential character makes the narrowest cultural fields seem inexhaustible from within. Anything that compromises this illusion terrifies us and stirs up the immemorial tendency to persecution.

It sometimes so happens that people who imagine that they are fighting the devil, whatever their particular notion of the devil may be, are thus turned, without any suspicion of the fact on their part, into his best servants!

Et c'est là, en même temps, ce qui donne l'illusion du progrès à ceux qui, ne connaissant qu'une civilisation, voient exclusivement la direction dans laquelle elle se développe, croient qu'elle est la seule possible, et ne se rendent pas compte que ce développement sur un point peut être largement compensé par une régression sur d'autres points.

il arrive malheureusement parfois que ceux qui croient combattre le diable, quelque idée qu'ils s'en fassent d'ailleurs, se trouvent ainsi tout simplement, sans s'en douter le moins du monde, transformés en ses meilleurs serviteurs !

Cela n'autorise-t-il pas à dire que la suprême habileté du diable, de quelque façon qu'on le conçoive, c'est de faire nier son existence ?

The "end of a world" never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.

Le nom de « religiosité » ne conviendrait-il pas beaucoup mieux à un tel ensemble de vagues aspirations sentimentales, qu'une étrange illusion fait prendre pour de la « spiritualité » ?

Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all.

What he imagines evokes nothing imaginary, it evokes the reality of the world that experience and reason treat in a confused manner.

Everyday objects shriek aloud.

The dishes that were meant to be hot were never quite as warm as those that were meant to be chilled.

In der Tat ist Foucaults Werk ein verwirrendes Labyrinth, in welchem der Autor, der keiner sein will und in Wahrheit nie das ist, was er zunächst zu sein scheint, umherirrt und sich verliert.

Nobody has a perfect life. What you see on the screen is the best of the artist.

although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.

But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming.