Quotes About Illusion

You'll see it lovely. I never will. But it will be lovely.

Her gayety seemed like jewels on a skull

was always trying to improve the appearance of the package, because he knew that the goods inside were rotten.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.

Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.

Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one's life.

In the head of the adoring male is the illusion that sublime beauty is all head and wings, with no bottom to betray it. In one of Swift's poems a young man explains the grotesque contradiction that is tearing him apart: Nor wonder how I lost my Wits; Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia, shits! In other words, in Swift's mind there was an absolute contradiction between the state of being in love and an awareness of the excremental function of the beloved.

This penetrating vocabulary of initiatory acts, the infectiousness of the unconflicted person, priority magic, and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that father permits it or orders it. It is more: the magical heroic transformation of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion.

the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie.

Why are groups so blind and stupid?" men have always asked. "Because they demand illusions," answered Freud. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real. And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit. It tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way.

Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies.

Naively, one may suppose those at the Top who take decisions are poly­mathic supermen, somehow qualified to assess the many-sided implications of their decisions. Acquaintance with any of them dispels such illusions.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

its pretty to think so

We both touched wood on the cafe table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as this cafe table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy.

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 

After a while, when you are as ugly as I am, as ugly as women can be, then, as I say, after a while the feeling, the idiotic feeling that you are beautiful, grows slowly in one again. It grows like a cabbage. And then, when the feeling is grown, another man sees you and thinks you are beautiful and it is all to do over. Now I think I am past it, but it still might come. You are lucky, 'guapa', that you are not ugly

THE GAMBLER,THE NUN,& THE RADIO I am a poor idealist. I am a victim of illusions. He laughed.

It was one of those things that gave you a false feeling of soldering.

For many things are not as they appear. Discipline must come from trust and confidence.

Yes, I said. Isn't it pretty to think so?