Quotes About Illusion

What's real? What's not? That's what I do in my act, test how other people deal with reality.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.

The number of portraits one saw of [Emperor Franz Joseph] was almost as great as the number of inhabitants of his realms…. Believing in his existence was rather like seeing certain stars although they ceased to exist thousands of years ago.

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.

And what would you do, ... if you could rule the world for a day? I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality.

What trouble we go to, trying to fool people who see right through us anyhow.

Our visual system does not simply reflect external reality but rather actively constructs it.

Christians began to slip in the late 1990s, expanding the tent to include white Catholics helped perpetuate the illusion that White Christian America was still the country's dominant religious culture. But

The heart grows brutal from feeding on fantasies.

Science,' said Mr Anders Anders. 'Science, not magic. I told you before: when things are not as they appear to be, it's because they're actually simpler than you think them to be. Things are never as difficult and complicated as folk believe. You'd be surprised just how straightforward and obvious things really are. The secret is in knowing how to look at them the right way.

This ridiculous object has been strutting around saying I this and I that and all the while it has no more I than a scarecrow and no more will than a puppet.

The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego.

To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates. Among

What is reality?" - "One of the many possible illusions.

Dramocles got up from the operating table thinking he had just had a massage, and now wanted to take a brisk walk. A posthypnotic command took him a hundred yards from Fish's laboratory. Then he heard the explosion. Hurrying back, he saw that Dr. Fish had been blown up. Dramocles couldn't imagine why anyone would want to blow up an inoffensive android like Fish. He never considered the possibility that he had done it himself, since exploded androids tell no tales.

The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.

How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems.

He would keep what he would always believe had to be a false memory of her falling like a booted Icarus out of a lighted sky in which there was somehow falling snow and her mouth open in a lovely O that had started to shape a word, and her long legs against the electric light, shooting out of the blue plastic square that rose like a kite lifting on a whirlwind and one of her boots flying what seemed the length of the block

Melmotte is really little more than rumor and illusion; his sudden rise is due less to any deep scheming or villainy on his part than to society's apparent inability to enforce its own standards.

The same goes for authority: looking like the real thing may have more impact than actually being it.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself

The mask of self-deception was not longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord.

Robert W. Chambers