Quotes About Illusion

On ne peut opposer absraitement le spectacle et l'activité sociale effective.

Le spectacle est la principale production de la société actuelle.

But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness." —Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity

The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function.

The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality.

The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone's concrete life to a universe of speculation.

Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism.

spectacolul este visul urat al societatii moderne incatusate, care nu e, in cele din urma, decat expresia dorintei sale de a dormi. spectacolul e paznicul acestui somn.

In contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted.

Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself.

la belleza. Cuando la verdad y la experiencia no se la mostraron, se volvió hacia la fantasía y la ilusión, hallándola en sus mismos umbrales, entre los nebulosos recuerdos de los cuentos de su niñez y entre los sueños.

Religion is a conceited effort to deny the most obvious realities.

Love is the mistaken belief that one woman differs from another.

O amor é a ilusão de que uma mulher difere da outra

The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor.

Believing passionately in the palpably not true... is the chief occupation of mankind.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost.

Where does madness leave off and reality begin?

the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made

It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.

Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that the lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference.