Quotes About Illusion

A mask of gold hides all deformities.

Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice - it makes it seem easy.

The challenge in most car chases is you're trying to hide the fact that it's not the actor driving.

Who seems most hideous when adorned the most.

My mom was so good at hiding the bad in life that I thought all of life was good.

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.

Seeing is not believing—it is only seeing.

A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.

How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and her face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulchre, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful.

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality?

What it is, I can not tell; I only know it is not that which the young fool calls it, still less that which the old sinner thinks it.

What is time, but the airy ocean in which ghosts come and go!

But time is a cruel mistress, and it was not until much years later that she would learn the truth: that there is no such thing as salvation, an escape is only ever an illusion conjured up by the hopeful.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.

This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.

There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence.

Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.

the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane.

The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle [World War II], while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.