Quotes About Illusion

What is all this talk of elephants and seals?' asked Frog. 'It's nonsense', said the father, 'and yet it's not the child's fault. Our motor is in me. He fills the empty space inside himself with foolish dreams that cannot possibly come true'.

His eyes look as if he's pawned his real ones and is wearing paste.

Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination.

I have always used the world of make-believe with a certain desperation.

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

Everything seemed to grow blacker as I sat there, except for the fireflies whose tiny pulsing lights drew arcs through the dark summer air. On off . . . on off . . . on off . . . on off. The longer I stared, the dizzier I got, until I felt as if the world was tipping and pitching me forward down the mountainside into the long throat of the night.

Maybe she was in a coma after all and just didn't know it.

It's probably the oldest question in the book, but that doesn't mean it's not special to you. Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

this feeling of alive is not so easy to experience. Even although life is a thing that seems to have some kind of weight and shape, this is only an illusion. Our feeling of alive has no real edge or boundary.

if the washroom was unreal, then none of what he remembered from that afternoon in the washroom could be real, either.

Yes, it's good to remember. A lot of people have asked your question, Benny. It's probably the oldest question in the book, but that doesn't mean it's not special to you. Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things

Every person is trapped in their own particular bubble of delusion, and it's every person's task in life to break free. Books can help. We can make the past into the present, take you back in time and help you remember. We can show you things, shift your realities and widen your world, but the work of waking up is up to you.

When up looks up, up is down. When down looks down, down is up. Not-one, not-two. Not same. Not different. Now do you see? It

chasing a lie smaller than her dreams.... from: Save Me the Plums

You look like a cat touching a mirror," said Carol, watching me. "You know the way they look at themselves and then reach out a paw as if they can't believe it's glass and not another cat?

He turned on to the track and wondered why no birds were singing. The only sound he could hear was the buzz and rattle of a drill, which he assumed to be the farmer doing something to a fence. It was, in fact, a woodpecker whose presence would have thrilled him had he known what it was.

were altered and aggrandised by enormous fantasy.

Sólo cuando de verdad veías las palabras desaparecer, te dabas cuenta de lo secas y muertas que estaban, como hojas marchitas o dinero viejo y desechado.

Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking for the real you and never find it—slice yourself open and all you'll find is blood and muscle and bone...

Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.

What philosophers say about actuality [Virkelighed] is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.

Life's existential tasks have lost the interest of reality; illusion cannot build a sanctuary for the divine growth of inwardness which ripens to decisions. One man is curious about another, every one is undecided, and their way of escape is to say that some one must come who will do something--and then they will bet on him.

No, like worldly contempt, worldly honor is a whirlpool, a play of confused forces, an illusory moment in the flux of opinions. It is a sense-deception, as when a swarm of insects at a distance seem to the eye like one body; a sense-deception, as when the noise of the many at a distance seems to the ear like a single voice.

Such works are mirrors: when an ape peers into them, no Apostle can be seen looking out.