Quotes About Illusion

If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow overcome the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.

But though it is unreal, it is not meaningless.

Sanity was statistical.

I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls, And woke to find it true; I wasn't born for an age like this; Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.

Se volessi» aveva detto O'Brien, «potrei sollevarmi da questo pavimento come una bolla di sapone.» Winston sviluppò e risolse il senso di quest'affermazione: Se lui pensa di potersi sollevare in volo e contemporaneamente io penso di vederglielo fare, allora questa cosa accade. D'un tratto, come un rottame sommerso che emerge dall'acqua, gli affiorò alla mente questo pensiero: Ma non accade veramente, siamo noi che l'immaginiamo. È un'allucinazione.

She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths.

Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.

When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing.

We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. we do not destroy the heretic because he resist us: so long as he resist us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.

The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a "real" world where "real" things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.

Görüntü; görüntü her ÅŸeyden önemlidir mon ami... Aç görünmek ölümcüldür. Ä°nsanlarda seni tekmeleme isteÄŸi uyand?r?r.

Le creature di fuori gurdavano dal maiale all'uomo dall'uomo al maiale e ancora dal maiale all'uomo, ma già era loro impossibile distinguere fra i due.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.

The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save though out own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I'm finished with this notion of getting back into the past. What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.

This war is a racket the same as any other.

Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant.

How many fingers, Winston?' 'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.' 'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?' 'Really to see them.

Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.

Her taÅŸ blokunun içinde bir heykel olmas?na benzer ÅŸekilde, her ÅŸiÅŸman?n da içinde zay?f birinin olduÄŸuna hiç dikkat ettiniz mi?

As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.