Quotes About Illusion

You don't know love when you see it. You've tricked something out with your imagination that you think love, and you expect the real thing to look like that. There, that's the first sensible thing I've ever said in my life. I wonder how I managed it?

Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond, I read about them and I tried to imagine what they would be like ... When I saw a real diamond in a lady's ring one day I was so disappointed I cried. Of course, it was very lovely but it wasn't my idea of a diamond.

T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

Tell me, Wittgenstein's asked a friend, why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating? His friend replied, Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth. Wittgenstein replied, Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained.

The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain.

Our motto might be: Let us not be bewitched.

383. The argument I may be dreaming is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well - and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

We all grasp on to a single idea of ourselves, the way aging people dye their hair. It's no matter that this dye doesn't fool you. My lady, you don't dye your hair to decieve other people, or to fool yourself, but rather to cheat your image in your mirror a little.

In his madness he became a terrifying actor!

Tutti i fenomeni o sono illusori o la ragione di essi ci sfugge, inesplicabile. Manca affatto alla nostra conoscenza del mondo e di noi stessi quel valore obiettivo che comunemente presumiamo di attribuirle. È una costruzione illusoria continua.

Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach us if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow

ieri, pare che faceste all'altalena, e su, e giù, e io nel mezzo ad aggiustarmi e ad aggiustarvi a punto. Ah! avete creduto di giocarvi me, la mia vita? Avete fallito il colpo, cari miei! Io ho giocato voi.

Mi si fissò invece il pensiero ch'io non ero per gli altri quel che finora , dentro di me, m'ero figurato d'essere.

E eu devia ser louco de verdade, se esperava que uma boneca como aquela enlouquecesse juntamente comigo, assim por nada.

Ah che tentazione di prenderle il viso tra le mani per costringerla a guardare nell'abisso di due occhi ben altri da quelli da cui voleva essere guardata!

We deceive ourselves so easily. Especially when we enjoy believing a certain thing...

when you are in front of a mirror, the moment you look at yourself again, you are no longer alive.

reality is not a thing conferred upon us or which exists; it is something that we have to manufacture ourselves.

haven't you yet perceived that it isn't possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?

Ma che finzione! Realtà, realtà, signori! Realtà!

I saw then my father for the first time, as I had never seen him before, externalized in his own life, but not as he had been to himself, not as he had felt himself to be, which was something I could never know; but rather, as a being that was wholly strange to me, in that reality which, as I now be held him, I might suppose that others had imposed upon him.