Quotes About Illusion

He was tall, dark, and handsome in his black-and-silver finery, walking as if he owned the world. Only his quick blink and the worried pucker between his eyebrows gave away the fact that he knew he didn't - not even a little piece of it.

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

You must now go home, where everything -- you can be quite sure -- will be falser than here....You must go now. You'll leave by the right, through the alley....

If I have viewed them from a certain angle, it is because, seen from there, that is how they looked--which may be due to prismatic distortion, but which is therefore what they also are, though unaware of being it.

when Divine seeks out the lost Alberto, she tries to portray him on herself and invents his smile with her own mouth. She puckers her muscles in what she thinks is the right way, the way–so she thinks when she feels her mouth twisting–that makes her resemble Alberto, until the day it occurs to her to do it in front of a mirror, and she realizes that her grimaces in no way resemble the smile we have already called starlike.)

It was therefore natural for me to imagine what his penis would be if he smeared it for my benefit with so fine a substance, with that precious cobweb, a tissue which I secretly called the veil of the palace.

one must love the Circus and despise the world.

Kim ki bu yaln?zl?k kar??nda büyülenmemiÅŸtir, resmin güzelliÄŸini anlayamaz. Anl?yorum derse, yaland?r.

Fascism is theater.

Als er iets mis gaat, (...) gaat mijn geest, zodra ik, maar even de tijd krijg, (...), aan het werk om mij de al te wrede werkelijkheid te maskeren. Zo snel mogelijk maak ik voor mezelf een wereld waarin ik hofjonker ben, prins, koning of scheepsjongen (...). Het is alsof een handle wordt overgehaald en een valluik zich opent, waardoor ik in een fantasiewereld stort die wraak neemt. (...) het kan ook zijn dat in het dromen mijn roeping ligt.

It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.

When I beheld you, suddenly - for perhaps a second - I had the strength to reject everything that wasn't you and to laugh at the illusion. But my shoulders are very frail. I was unable to bear the weight of the world's condemnation. And I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love and when love would have made men's contempt unbearable, and their contempt would have made my love unbearable. The fact is, I hate you.

I also realized that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them. So I chose another guide and said, Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits

Every edit is a lie.

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second

social media is not real life. Her photos, which looked like casual snaps, actually took several hours to set up and up to a hundred attempts to get right...

We're not number one, but we're number one in thinking we are number one.

Fancy rules over two thirds of the universe, the past, and future, while reality is confined to the present

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.

But our lives were not as they seemed, were they, Sophia? No one's life ever is.

Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.

I know all about myself now, I know. You've told me so often. You haven't left me one rag of illusion to clothe myself in.

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.

that expression you get in your eyes when you are very tired and everything is like a dream and you are starting to know what things are like underneath what people say they are.