Quotes About Illusion

La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n'est que le prestige d'un moment; l'œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme. (The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes, she continued, is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.) [Le beau Laurence]

Then she had doubts about the reality of her situation and wondered if her imminent departure was not the illusion of a dream.

Dejadme escapar de la mentirosa y criminal ilusión de la felicidad! Dadme trabajo, cansancio, dolor y entusiasmo.

We pretend to catch and eat more pretend bugs than could ever actually live in one cave. The number of pretend bugs we pretend to catch and eat would in reality basically fill a cave the size of our cave.

Her hair looked like her hair in the dream and her eyes looked like her eyes in the dream, and as for her body, he couldn't tell, she was wearing a mumu.

None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear.

Now all these happy sites and sounds seem like triks. Now it seems like the gud times are mere lee smoke that, upon blowing away, here is the reel life, which is: rok hats, kikking, stomping.

In the beginning, there's a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world.

You were told the big something/someone loved you especially but in the end you saw it was otherwise. The big something/someone was neutral. Unconcerned. When it innocently moved, it crushed people.

None of that ever was, he said. And it never will be.

I think fiction at its best can serve as a moment of induced bafflement that calls into question our usual relation to things and reminds us that our minds, as nice as they are, aren't necessarily up to the task of living, and shouldn't get cocky.

Now it seems like the gud times are mere lee smoke that, upon blowing away, here is the reel life, which is: rok hats, kikking, stomping. Every minit with no kikking and stomping now seems like not a real minit.

Life is suffering, the Buddha said, by which he did not mean Every moment of life is unbearable but rather All happiness/rest/contentment is transient; all appearances of permanence are illusory.

Two passing temporariness developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond. I mistook him for solidity, and now must pay.

That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see, is formed of words…and it is true that words, their labyrinths, the exhausting immensity of their "possibles", in short their treachery, have something of quicksand about them.

El tiempo no significa más que la huida de los objetos que parecían verdaderos.

VII The happiness we find in becoming is possible only by annihilating the reality of "existences" and lovely appearance, and through the pessimistic destruction of illusions: so, by annihilating even the loveliest appearances, Dionysian happiness attains its height.

C'est en identifiant réalité et quantité que l'esprit humain s'est fait connaissance. Mais il convient de ne pas oublier que la connaissance scientifique, en invalidant des qualités qu'elle fait apparaître illusoires, ne les annule pas pour autant. La quantité c'est la qualité niée, mais non la qualité supprimée.

A few writers by implication touched upon the true social issue, that equality of rights was an illusion to those lacking the means to use it.

Un rond, pas tout à fait clos, finissant par un trait horizontal: on aurait dit un grand G vu dans un miroir.

Pero tú, pobre Dédalo, no tenías laberinto. Falso prisionero, tu puerta estaba abierta.

I felt for too long anyway that there was something creaky about this story. You needn't try to understand, but when all the material clues manage to confuse matters rather than clarify them, it means they've been faked … and everything, without exception, is fake in this case. It all creaked.

We have a tendency to imagine people the way we would like them to be.

You can't go about smelling of April and May, the pair of you, and then expect to gull people into thinking you don't mean to get riveted!