Quotes About Illusion

Simulant - something that doesn't exist but pretends to. ... Dissimulant - an object that exists but pretends not to.

The most recent of the iamides, heavily advertised - authentium. Creates synthetic recollections of things that never happened. A few grams of dantine, for instance, and a man goes around with a deep conviction that he has written The Divine Comedy. Why anyone would want that is another matter and quite beyond me.

If everything became 'artificial,' then nothing was 'artificial.

A real tank now costs about a million dollars, while a hallucinated one amounts to less than one-hundredth of a cent per person, or centispecter per spectator. A destroyer costs a dime. Today you could fit the whole arsenal of the United States inside a single truck.

He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had

siempre y en todas partes es lo mismo que nunca y en ningún lugar.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur

It was as if we knew goodness knows how many specimens, whereas in reality there was still only one, which admittedly weighted seventeen billion tons.

We come into this world trusting that things are as we see them, that what our senses witness is happening, but later it turns out, somehow, that children grow up and grownups start to die.

To a real elephant, and not a sheep, wolf, or gnu in elephant's clothing, you are not there. There is no You. There is no Is. There is only the Elephant. Don't you see how silly that

T]he real lie that advertising tells is not so much in what it shows, but in what it leaves out.

Ho analizzato il suo sorriso. È il sorriso di qualcuno abituato a pensare che tutti gli credano. Un ghigno irreale, finto, convinto di essere irresistibile. Come quei comici che usano le risate registrate. Ecco: un sorriso di risate finte.

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.

Hope is a terrible gift. The return policy is heartbreak.

Impossible means nothing to me. It's an illusion designed to weed out the weak from the strong.

A person who is asleep is either lost in deep unconsciousness or absorbed in a dream. Metaphorically, this was how the Buddha must have seen both his previous self as well as everyone else he had known: they either were blind to the questions of existence or sought consolation from them in metaphysical or religious fantasies.

We perceive the world in a particular way and confidently expect it to conform to its appearance. But we fail to recognize that certain aspects of the 'reality' that appear to us are nothing but figments of our own imagination. In this confusion a conflict ensues between the world as it is and the world as we believe it to be. And the more we insist on our infallibility, the more frustrated we become as the actual world again and again stubbornly refuses to live up to our expectations.

Were mind and matter me, I would come and go like them. If I were something else, They would say nothing about me. —N?G?RJUNA, M?lamadhyamaka-k

It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to a point where none of it seems real.

And the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are.

I was looking at this tree but it was a dragon and then a tree

It was like when you see a movie in the theater during the day, and when you leave the movie, you can't believe that it's still daylight outside

He saw a baby elephant tied to a post with a steel chain. The baby ripped and scratched and tried to get free, but the chain wouldn't break. Then, he saw a grown elephant tied to a post with nothing but a little piece of rope. He asked his mother how the little piece of rope held the big elephant in place. She explained they chain the babies until they give up. The elephants think that little piece of rope is still a chain.

And I could hear all these songs on the radio, but the radio wasn't on.