Quotes About Illusion

We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see.

paradise cannot be constructed out of concrete.

I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing: it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or most, details, by new advances in psychology and neurology. What I am hoping for is that it will be found to contain a shadowy pattern of truth, and that it may stimulate those who search for unity in the diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion.

We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked. ...

Illusion, then, is the simultaneous presence and interaction in the mind of two universes, one real, one imaginary. It transports the spectator from the trivial present to a plane remote from self-interest and makes him forget his own preoccupations and anxieties; in other words, it facilitates the unfolding of his participatory emotions, and inhibits or neutralizes his self-asserting tendencies.

Trace the contours of your face with a soapy finger on the bathroom mirror (it is easily done by closing one eye). There is a shock waiting: the image which looked life-size has shrunk to half-size, like a headhunter's trophy. A person walking away does not seem to become a dwarf -- as he should; a black glove looks just as black in the sunlight as in shadow -- though it should not;

There might be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it.

Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears.

Some dream I had must have mistaken you for God that day.

Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been..

WILLY: Biff is a lazy bum! LINDA: They're sleeping. Get something to eat. Go on down. WILLY: Why did he come home? I would like to know what brought him home. LINDA: I don't know. I think he's still lost, Willy. I think he's very lost. WILLY: Biff Loman is lost. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such—personal attractiveness, gets lost. And such a hard worker. There's one thing about Biff—he's not lazy.

WILLY: I was thinking of the Chevvy. Slight pause. Nineteen twenty-eight . . . when I had that red Chevvy— Breaks off. That funny? I coulda sworn I was driving that Chevvy today.

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

Why is it that, in spite of all the mirrors in the world, no one really knows what he looks like?

Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.

Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that, to conceal their infirmity, they set to work to clap vigorously as soon as ever they saw one or two persons applauding?

Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!

It is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too.

Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he can starve again tomorrow.

the ancient wisdom of the Indian philosophers declares, "It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake.

While illusion distorts reality for a moment, error can reign for a millennia in abstractions, throw its iron yoke over whole peoples and stifle the noblest impulses of humanity; those it cannot deceive are left in chains by those it has, by its slaves.

We learn by experience that happiness and pleasure are a fata morgana, which, visible from afar, vanish as we approach; that, on the other hand, suffering and pain are a reality, which makes its presence felt without any intermediary, and for its effect, stands in no need of illusion or the play of false hope.

En büyük bilgelik ÅŸu andan zevk almay? hayat?n en büyük amac? k?lmakt?r, çünkü tek gerçek budur, baÅŸka her ÅŸey düÅŸünce oyunudur. Ama bunun en büyük budalal???m?z olduÄŸunu da söyleyebiliriz, çünkü yaln?zca k?sa bir süre için var olan ve bir rüya gibi kaybolan içinde bulunduÄŸumuz bu an asla ciddi bir çabaya deÄŸmez.