Quotes About Illusion

fiction works because a part of the mind forgets that it's fiction while we're reading it.

I looked down into my glass. It held club soda, but the way I was gazing into it you'd have thought it was filled with something stronger. I used to stare like that into glasses of whiskey, as if they contained coded answers. All they did was dissolve the questions, but there was a time when that was enough.

You can build a whole world of lies, as long as each lie reinforces every other lie. You can create a masterful structure of sheer logic if you begin with one false postulate. All it takes is consistency.

I watched men win and I watched them lose. They were playing a straight house. Nothing was loaded. The house took its own little percentage and got rich. Money made in bootlegging and gunrunning and dope smuggling and whoremongering was invested quite properly in an entire town that stood as a monument to human stupidity, a boomtown in the state with the sparsest population and the densest people in the country. Vegas.

Balthazar sighed and said Truth naked and unashamed. That's a splendid phrase. But we always see her as she seems, never as she is. Each man has his own interpretation.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

The most tender, the most tragic of illusions is perhaps to believe that our actions can add or subtract from the total quantity of good and evil in the world.

If you are born of the artist tribe it is a waste of time to try and function as a priest. You have to be faithful to your angle of vision, and at the same time recognise its partiality. There is a kind of perfection to be achieved in matching oneself to one's capacities at every level. This must, I imagine, do away with strivings, and with illusions too.

If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!

The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

We often confuse what we wish for with what is.

Most orgies that you go to, I have found, most of it is sad. All that wildness, all those laughs were like the shining silver and gold paper on packages, but there was nothing inside.

How sad that we can now go up in aeroplanes and see that there are no gods upon the clouds.

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

Love is like a magic trickYou know you are getting fooled, but still, you stand in lineAnd pay to see it again and again.

If something's permanent, it's definitely not love.

Magic is the sole science not accepted by scientists, because they can't understand it.

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

What I thought was unreal now, for me, seems in some ways to be more real than what I think to be real, which seems now to be unreal

What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.

The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence.

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.