Quotes About Illusion

I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.

Boo'ful, she said, life could be so diff'rent— But it never is, I said.

Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.

It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie. Perhaps

An illusion was creating a counter-illusion. Where would it end? Did they believe their own propaganda? Afterwards

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

Play the game, but don't believe in it—that much you owe yourself.

Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world.

Perhaps the truth was always a lie.

HARRY: I tell you, it is not me you are looking at, Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks Incriminate, but that other person, if person, You thought I was: let your necrophily Feed upon that carcase.… T. S. Eliot, Family Reunion

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . .

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your hear that every day is the best day of the year.

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Dream delivers us to dream and there is no end to illusion.

Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known.

Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.

Each is liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination.

That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.