Quotes About Illusion

She understood. They were plastic flowers of words—but they looked nice on the surface.

It was a beautiful lie that they had all been telling themselves—that you could have magic without monsters.

the water was holding [him] close and telling him beautiful lies, and since it was the end, he chose to believe them.

Now she would be part girl, part hardening gray sludge. And no one would notice the difference.

Our fear is like the first tile in a string of dominoes. Our denial of fear causes us to lie, to cheat, and to become people we don't even respect in order to maintain our illusion of control.

web of a drunken spider.

Life is an illusion that last too little.

This world is full of forms that are illusory, and the values are all wrong, the proportions are out of focus. The things which a man of the world thinks valuable, a spiritual man must cast aside as worthless.

As with visual illusions, we can't make our minds work differently than they do no matter how smart we are. Just as we can't unsee an illusion, intellect or willpower alone can't make us resist motivated reasoning.

figure out why those things happened, we are susceptible to a variety of cognitive traps, like assuming causation when there is only a correlation, or cherry-picking data to confirm the narrative we prefer. We will pound a lot of square pegs into round holes to maintain the illusion of a tight relationship between our outcomes and our decisions.

In the movie, the matrix was built to be a more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable: our beliefs are nearly always correct; favorable outcomes are the result of our skill; there are plausible reasons why unfavorable outcomes are beyond our control; and we compare favorably with our peers. We deny or at least dilute the most painful parts of the message.

One of Teller's valuable insights is that pedestal-building creates the illusion of progress rather than actual progress itself.

When we see how much negative space there really is, we shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects our naturally optimistic nature.

This phenomenon is called the better-than-average effect.

When we own something, we value it more highly than an identical item that we do not own. Richard Thaler was the first to name this cognitive illusion, calling it the endowment effect. In fact, he introduced the endowment effect in that same 1980 paper where he coined the term "sunk cost." He described the endowment effect as "the fact that people often demand more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.

The challenge is not to change the way our brains operate but to figure out how to work within the limitations of the brains we already have. Being aware of our irrational behavior and wanting to change is not enough, in the same way that knowing that you are looking at a visual illusion is not enough to make the illusion go away.

Astro Teller also understands a subtler but no less important point, that we have a tendency, when we butt up against a monkey that is proving difficult to solve, to turn our attention to building pedestals rather than giving up. We prefer that illusion of progress to having to quit and admit defeat.

il y a un chimpanzé sur l'autel, il se révèle ensuite être un ours.

Maya is a projection of consciousness, but not consciousness itself.

I probably complicate things unnecessarily now just to give the illusion of professionalism.

I've always done magic as a hobby. I've done it professionally, too.

The greatest enemy of progress is the illusion of knowledge.

One of the lies that we tell ourselves is that we're making progress; but Huey's chair's empty.

Hollywood is an image. We project these fantasies on to it, but people are just people.