Quotes About Illusion

La belleza altera la textura de la realidad.

I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances," he said. "It's not that we're so smart, it's just that we don't look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers as far as everyone else is concerned. But these guys won't be taken in by that.

Once, to my delight, I even saw him wearing pince-nez. (Later, I discovered that they weren't real prince-nez, but only had glass in them, and that his eyes were a good deal sharper than my own.)

how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet -- for me, anyway -- all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships.

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion.

For a moment, as his arm touched mine, he was a creature of flesh and blood, but the next he was a hallucination again, a figment of the imagination stalking down the hallway as heedless of me ass ghosts, in their shadowy rounds, are said to be heedless of the living.

Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care all about the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right reasons? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet- for me anyway- all that's worth living for lies in that charm?

a drve?e je ispred na cesti cvalo bijelim praskovima delirija.

Yet within a few minutes of waking, that country of dream has gone, its taste and reality has drained away into ordinary life. All you have left is an intellectual conviction held in a set of words. You want to remember. You try to remember. You have a set of words to offer your friend, or repeat to yourself. But the reality has gone, evaporated.

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brain-washed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes. There is nothing much we can do about this except to remember that it is so. Every one of us is part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself. These

Di quali ricordi ci possiamo fidare? Basta solo pensarci di sfuggita per accorgersi che i ricordi sono sicuri quanto una bolla di sapone.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

A lie is a broad and spacious and glittering thing, sweeping belief before it from its very grandeur. But the truth fits, like an old man cutting cloth in an attic.

What had you expected? A viper, or a devil, or a ravening idiot; Milo with the ox on his shoulders, Angra-Mainyo prepared to do battle with Zoroaster, or the Golden Ass? Or didn't you know the family colouring? Richard hasn't got it. Poor Richard is merely Brown and fit to break bread with …

What about Odysseus?' said Kiaya Khátún. Marthe turned away, and moved to the door. 'He is not a man,' she said. 'He is Chaos, a mythical bird with a name, but no body; agreeable only to the eye of the mind.

A lie is a broad and spacious and glittering thing, sweeping belief before it from its very grandeur. But the truth fits, like an old man cutting cloth in an attic. And that, Philippa did not need to be told, was the truth, which Lymond had guessed long before her.

He had outlived the luxurious agonies of youthful blood, and in this very freedom from illusion he recognised the loss of something. From now on, every hour of light-heartedness would be, not a prerogative but an achievement - one more axe or case-bottle or fowling-piece, rescued, Crusoe-fashion, from a sinking ship.

Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.

But sleep is only an illusion of weakness and, unless it appeals to our protective instincts, is likely to arouse in us a nasty, bullying spirit. From a height of conscious superiority we look down on the sleeper, thus exposing himself in all his frailty, and indulge in derisive comment upon his appearance, his manners and (if the occasion is a public one) the absurdity of the position in which he has placed his companion, if he has one, and particularly if we are that companion.

Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn....

Reality is frequently inaccurate.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.

How can I tell, said the man, that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?