Quotes About Illusion

Is this a vision? Is this a dream? Do I sleep?

Glory is like a circle in the water, which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, till by broad spreading, it disperses to naught.

La vida es una sombra tan sólo, que transcurre; un pobre actor que, orgulloso, consume su turno sobre el escenario para jamás volver a ser oído. Es una historia contada por un necio, llena de ruido y furia, que nada significa.

The world in which we live is no more real than a moon beam reflected in water drawn from the palm of the hand...

We pretended to be of mud instead of stars. We pretended not to fly.

I guess love distorts our perception of reality, and it's even harder to recognize the truth when it's buried underneath layers of what we imagine relationships should be like.

Don't be stupid, privacy is an illusion in today's electronic world. And i always investigate the people who interest me

She was a fairy-tale princess out of his comic book fantasies. She glowed like a star. He hated it. It made his jaw clench [...]. It made him want to wreck something, punch walls, hurl plates. He wanted to drag her into a corner and rip off her glittering veil of illusions. Remind her that she was his beautiful wild animal, not this remote, perfect being. She was earth and sweat and blood and bone, she was hunger and need and howling at the moon. Just like him. Part of him.

Ranulf had spent much of his life watching those he loved wrestle with the seductive, lethal lure of kingship. It had proved the ruination of his cousin Stephen, a good man who had not made a good king. For his sister Maude, it had been an unrequited love affair, a passion she could neither capture nor renounce. For Hywel, it had been an illusion, a golden glow ever shimmering along the horizon. He believed that his nephew had come the closest to mastery of it, but at what cost?

Having' something makes us think we can control it.

Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.

I have often found anger more comfortable than fear. Anger gives me the illusion of control, while fear leaves me naked and exposed.

The roles Reagan played in his earlier career were an apprenticeship for his original contribution to American government, the creation of a "performance president" who fashioned illusion (a tough leader who had learned to throw a crisp salute) from inauthenticity (almost persuading himself that he had been present when inmates were freed from concentration camps).

The vast majority of mankind remain imprisoned in the cave and incapable of grasping the true nature of things. Their best hope is to accept the power of those versed in the true philosophy. Plato darkly concludes: by nature the masses prefer an illusory reality, and so they may turn on the philosopher, making him a martyr to the truth. Thus the masses fear the truth, and their instinct is to cling to the unreal.12

The perception is always more important than the truth.

Much of life, he said to me, depends on our being ignorant of reality. If we understood reality, we would never go on.

Si una cosa he aprendido, sin duda, es que la vida no es un cuento.

the child's life had allowed few if any illusions, and she already had an adult awareness that planning and happening were quite different things.

That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like the disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice. I'm traveling heavy with illusions.

Thing is, I don't believe in ghosts. But I see them all the time.

I ain't interested in the truth. I'm interested in the way things should be.

But it wasn't okay. It was about as far from okay as you can get. If okay was the earth, then I was standing on Jupiter. I don't know why I said it was okay. For some reason, I was protecting the feelings of the man who had broken my heart yet again.

He says the earth is an oval marble that nobody can win. He says the sky is not blue and the grass is not green. He says everything is a matter of perception.

I didn't yet know that romantic heroes—famous and not—are usually aimless nomads in disguise.