Quotes About Illusion

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I

A cloud of unreality hangs about men, events, discourses, purposes.

But at the corner I stopped to take my last look at the crew of the Narcissus. They were swaying irresolute and noisy on the broad flagstones before the Mint. They were bound for the Black Horse, where men, in fur caps with brutal faces and in shirt sleeves, dispense out of varnished barrels the illusions of strength, mirth, happiness; the illusion of splendor and poetry of life, to the paid-off crews of southern-going ships.

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

Our eyes were of no more use to us than if we had been buried miles deep in a heap of cotton-wool.

en dehors de l'optique d'espérance éternelle, en dehors de la tromperie des habitudes prises et de l'attente du bonheur toujours rêvé

Les mots, vous le savez, sont les plus grands ennemis de la réalité.

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children.

I was made to look at the convention that lurks in all truth and on the essential sincerity of falsehood.

Es extraño lo lejos que están las mujeres de la realidad. Viven en un mundo propio que jamás ha existido y que nunca podrá existir. Es demasiado hermoso y, si quisieran construirlo, se vendría abajo antes de la primera puesta de sol. Cualquiera de las malditas cosas con las que los hombres llevamos conviviendo sin problemas desde el día de la creación se pondría de por medio y lo desharía en pedazos.

It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset.

Falamos com indignação ou com entusiasmo; falamos sobre opressão, crueldade, crime, devoção, abnegação, virtude e nada sabemos, além de palavras. Ninguém sabe o que significa sofrimento ou sacrifício – exceto, talvez, as vítimas do misterioso propósito dessas ilusões.

To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad thing come forth and experience themselves is awakening.

A healthy self and an empty self are not contradictory; it just appears so because we use the same language to describe two different things. The whole path of meditation is about understanding that the self as an unchanging entity is a fiction, an illusory mental construct.

When you close your eyes there is the breath, sensations, sounds, thoughts—where is "man" or "woman" except as an idea, a concept?

From the beginning this "self" does not exist, yet because we're so firmly attached to the idea of it, we spend much of our lives defending or enlarging or satisfying this imaginary self. Meditation helps us to see its conceptual nature, to see that in reality it does not exist, that it is simply an idea, an extraneous projection onto what's happening in the moment.

Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up.

That crazy bastard may be the only sane one left.

Little by little, or maybe all at once, everything comes to mean its opposite; unreason argues itself into reason, and vice versa, and we cannot see the seams.

Oh, they're there all right, Orr had assured him about the flies in Appleby's eyes after Yossarian's fist fight in the officers' club, although he probably doesn't even know it. That's why he can't see things as they really are. How come he doesn't know it? inquired Yossarian. Because he's got flies in his eyes, Orr explained with exaggerated patience. How can he see he's got flies in his eyes if he's got flies in his eyes?

In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger's predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all.

You've got flies in your eyes. That's why you can't see them.

That's what Paradise is- never knowing the difference.