Quotes About Illusion

Arthur, sie ziehen die Grenzen zu eng. Ich verrate Ihnen ein Geheimnis, ein sehr großes und streng gehütetes Geheimnis, von dem alle wissen, außer Ihnen. Das hier ist ein Traum. Ich meine das nicht philosophisch, Gott bewahre! Es ist wirklich einer. Und zwar Ihrer. Wir alle gehören dazu, jeder von uns ist Ihre Erfindung. Wenn Sie aufwachen, sind wir weg, nichts mehr, gelöscht, es hat uns nie gegeben.

The eyes are not windows. There are nerve impulses, but no one reads them, counts them, translates them, and ruminates about them. Hunt for as long as you want, there's nobody home. The world is contained within you, and you're not there.

Of course it didn't prove anything of the sort, it merely showed that self-examination disturbs the personality, deflects the will, and zaps the mind; it proved that no one, seen clearly from the outside, resembles themselves at all.

Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

George Berkeley makes the case that all our knowledge of the world comes to us through our senses, so in the end all we've really got is this sense data inside our heads. We cannot claim that is a chair out there, only that we have some chair sense data in our minds. So it is impossible to claim that the chair is anything more than a bunch of sensory experiences that we cobble together in our minds and call a "chair.

We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Each serves a purpose, each imposes a limit on the influence of the other, and our experience of the world is the artful compromise that these tough competitors negotiate.

We expect the next car, the next house or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't

Memory uses the filling-in trick, but imagination is the filling-in trick

the only thing these facts clearly show is that people tend to see what they want to see.

We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain—not because the boat won't respond, and not because we can't find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just

Time is not an object but an abstraction, hence it does not lend itself to imagery

Because the media control sources of information, according to Dylan, "We live in a world of fantasy where Disney has won. . . . It's all fantasy.

Belonging to groups often generates a kind of narcosis that gives us the illusion of sharing something missing from all the members of the group as individuals: completeness. Our main fear—fear of dissolution, of being nothing—keeps us from realizing that when we think we are one particular thing, and therefore isolated, we indeed become only that thing and lose the rest.

I've acted all my life. All the world's a stage.' 'It's not.' Bressac tapped his nose thoughtfully. 'There's no rehearsal, no proper audience, no intermission, one performance only. Behind the scenes there are only more scenes. You can't tell if it's a tragedy or a comedy, but you know that, sooner or later, it'll be an historical. Daggers have solid blades and the blood is real.

It reminded Sade of some of the aristocrats, who had treated imprisonment as a bad joke, a mild annoyance that would be made right before any real damage was done. They had kept their dignity right up to the moment when the drum roll stopped and the blade fell. Then, too late, they screamed like children. As I would have done . The thought popped unwelcome into his head.

On hashish, he saw the elaborate furnishings of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior concentrating "to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm . . . To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry.

Si no conocemos los procesos que nos llevan a creer ciertas cosas, no seremos capaces de evitar creer ciertas cosas que en realidad son ficciones sin fundamento. Son cosas que aprisionan la mente como una soporífera y pesada tela de araña, y no le permiten cobrar altura. Son cosas que si usted las cree pueden llevarlo a la muerte prematura, y no querrá usted morir antes de tiempo, ¿verdad?

the Tsar next to her, grinning and preening at his latest triumph over the West. And just who did he think he was fooling with that starched and pressed face of his? Real fascists, thought Charlotte, did not use Botox.

Why, we're simply going to create an army of a million men. Conjure it up, I'm afraid, completely out of thin air.

The trouble is that we often don't remember them correctly.

The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.

Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time.

Be careful before you believe someone in this world because we are living in such a world where there is artificial lemon juice use for welcome drink and real lemons use for finger bowls.

over the realities.