Quotes About Illusion

Nature at the middle distance is familiar - so familiar that we are deluded into believing that we really know what it is all about. See very close at hand, or at a great distance, or from an odd angle, it seems disquietingly strange, wonderful beyond all comprehension.

La dictature parfaite aurait les apparences de la démocratie; une prison sans murs dont les prisonniers ne songeraient pas à s'évader. Un système d'esclavage où, grâce à la consommation et au divertissement, les esclaves auraient l'amour de leur servitude.

Uno puede tomarse unas vacaciones de la realidad siempre que se le antoje, y volver de las mismas sin siquiera un dolor de cabeza o una mitología

Si la mayoría de nosotros permanecemos ignorantes de nosotros mismos, es porque el autoconocimiento es doloroso y preferimos los placeres de la ilusión

zippicamiknicks

To think about events realistically, in terms of multiple causations, is hard and emotionally unrewarding. How much easier, how much more agreeable to trace each effect to a single and, if possible, a personal cause! To the illusion of understanding will be joined, in this case, the pleasure of hero-worship, if the circumstances are favourable, and the equal, or even greater pleasure, if they should be unfavourable, of persecuting a scapegoat

Query: how to combine the belief that the world is a to a great extent illusory with belief that it is none the less essential to improve the illusion? How to be simultaneously dispassionate and not indifferent, serene like an old man and active like a young one?

Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations

Their false compassion is called compassion and their false understanding is called understanding, for this is their most potent spell.

In vain we labour at the loathsome task Not knowing if we wake or sleep ; But in the end we lift the plumèd casque Of the dead warrior ; Find no chaste corpse therein, but a soft-smiling whore.

Shallow thinkers always seem to be obsessed by the stupidity that if anything is a shadow, dream, illusion, it ceases to exist.

I became an entirely different animal. In fact, I've often thought that there isn't any I at all ; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.

All this is true and false; and it is true and false to say that it is true and false.

I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on  awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning.

Thoughts are false.

My three-dimensional mind thinks all this 'real,' a history; where at most it is a geography, a partial [62] set of infinite aspects.

The Abyss of Hallucinations has Law and Reason; but in Truth there is no bond between the Toys of the Gods.

I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning.

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.

an impossible geometry

It will not have escaped you that this town simulates normality that is completely illusory: every day something happens that one might euphemistically call irritating.

Il buio sospende tutto. Non c'è nulla che possa, nel buio, diventare vero.