Quotes About Illusion

Do you have a name?" asked Jean. "Lots. All of them lovely and none of them true," she replied.

So that makes us robbers of robbers," said Bug, "who pretend to be robbers working for a robber of other robbers.

We don't believe in hard work when a false face and a good line of bullshit can do so much more

Full glass is an empty promise.

You see us wrong, who see with your eyes, And hear nothing true though straining your years. What thieves of wonder are these poor senses.

You see us wrong, who see with your eyes, And hear nothing true though straining your ears. What thieves of wonder are these poor senses.

There are no genuinely blue foods. Foods that appear blue such as blueberries are often a shade of purple.

There's a company called "True Mirror" that makes non reversing mirrors that show you how you actually appear to other people.

Our perception of "reality" is an act of faith based on mere fragments.

Just as pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time--sound.

Q: What is the definition of innocence? A: A nun working in a condom factory, thinking she's making sleeping bags for mice.

all a pretty face does is hide the ugly underneath, don't it?

Because all a pretty face does is hide the ugly underneath, don't it?

The face of Kardashian in an oil stain. Or a doorway to hell. Maybe those are the same thing.

Like the man who looked for hours under a streetlight for the keys he had dropped in the alley because the light was better there, we waste so much time looking for what we want where it isn't to be found, consumed by "the underlying fear of… being torn away from our chosen image of what or who we are in this world." (Miller)

No longer an innocent newborn, Elizabeth can tease, joke, and play make-believe because a gap has opened between what she knows to be so and what she pretends or imagines. More than any other quality, this gap is what distinguishes our species, enabling us to deceive one another and ourselves, but also enabling us to see beyond the way things happen to be, to envision alternatives, to make art and science and revolution, to invent things new under the sun.

If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more that we all shared the dream of never dying or traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner more unhappy illusion we call normal life.

Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.

Life is a lying dream, he only wake Who casts the World aside.

Castles in the air—they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build too. —HENRIK IBSEN (1828–1906), The Master Builder

When we want something to be true, when a belief makes us happy—that's precisely when we should be questioning. Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously greater.

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever

I think that the world ended a long time ago and no one realizes it. We're in a dream somewhere in a vortex of energy that just hasn't realized its nonexistence yet.

A real enlightened teacher is intense and they could care less what you think about anything at any time since you are lost in illusions.