Quotes About Illusion

It's not as if, when you see, the world winks out of existence.

It's in our very trying to define and arrange things for ourselves – trying to identify and assign meaning to things – that we end up creating a world that is ultimately meaningless.

W]e rely on what we think (conception), rather than on what we see (perception), … [T]here's unrest in our mind.

A kiss may not be the truth but it is what we wish were true." L.A. Story (1991) – Harris Telemacher (Steve Martin)

Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events.

The Feynman Dilemma A diner says to a waiter, "What's this fly doing in my soup?" And the waiter says, "It looks like the backstroke." Yet if the same scene is viewed while plunging into a black hole at the speed of light, it will look like a Mickey Mouse lunch pail from the thirties, except that Mickey's head has been replaced by a Lincoln penny

Ooh ho!" he says. "In such a small boat? Tonto!" Fool. "It's not so small, it's my whole house." The old man gestures toward his lower abdomen with cupped hands as if holding gigantic organs. We laugh at his joke as I shake my head no, open my eyes wide, and shiver as if frightened.

Conventional wisdom in Galbraith's view must be simple, convenient, comfortable and comforting - though not necessarily true.

They mistook the smoke for the fire.

No one wants distortion, but choosing itself is the distortion.

as Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson later noted,1 "in all probability . . . hocus pocus is nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus ("this is the body"), [a] ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church.

As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections--that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department--that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of the way out.

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.

It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.

Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth.

It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).

O auto-engano é talvez o mais cruel de todos os motivos, pois faz com que nos julguemos corretos quando estamos errados e nos encoraja a lutar quando deveríamos nos render. Nos desenhos animados e filmes, os vilões são degenerados que enrolam os bigodes e dão gargalhadas de júbilo pela própria maldade. Na vida real, os vilões estão convencidos de sua integridade.

Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain't what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.

Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain't what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times.25 As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

As people ages, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it

Dile a la gente que hay un hombre invisible en el cielo que creó el universo y la inmensa mayoría te creerá. Dile que la pintura está húmeda y tendrá que tocar para asegurarse.

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it:

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it:5