Quotes About Illusion

Somehow he had catapulted himself beyond the world's value system. But this very fact lay upon him an awesome responsibility to maintain the illusions of other men.

To take command, one must first create the illusion that command is already yours.

I can't escape reality but my mind can twist it for me. Therefore, mind can manipulate things.

It was a beautiful lie that they had all been telling themselves—that you could have magic without monsters.

We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.

Beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

It may be that ministers really think that their prayers do good, and it may be that frogs imagine that their croaking brings spring.

Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.

Look as a painted man is no man and as painted fire is no fire so a cold prayer is no prayer.

When I'm not in a relationship, I shave one leg. That way, when I sleep, it feels like I'm with a woman.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

Love is supposed to bring you peace and happiness. If you are not feeling this in a relationship, you are living an illusion.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

I used to believe in forever, but forever's too good to be true

Marriage: A word which should be pronounced "mirage".

So tell me what I see when I look in your eyes, is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise?

The relationship between the make-up man and the film actor is that of accomplices in crime

Henri Bergson thought the principal function of the brain was to filter out most of reality so that we could focus on the tasks of earthly life," he said. "When the filter is weakened by a powerful drug, what we see is not delusion but the truth.

There are two ways of mentally representing money, one based on actual dollars and another based on buying power. Practically everyone knows that the first way is "wrong" whenever there's inflation. But both representations command attention and both affect decisions, sometimes unconsciously. This suggests that the money illusion may be a form of anchoring.

One of Stevens's epigrams ran, 'Black is white with a bright ring around it.' The Orwellian tone of that statement is justified. Stevens knew only too well that you can get people to believe almost anything about their own perceptions with a little sleight of hand. Subjectively, there are no absolutes, only contrasts.

Gus, I know you hit your head, but you should be able to tell a few things about Tara. Like for instance she isn't printed on cheap paper. When she talks, her words don't appear in balloons over her head. And after long and hard study, I can guarantee she exists in at least three dimensions.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours.