Quotes About Illusion

He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

several of our company told of ghosts, one, how a man had been slain on the way to the wars, but had not known it, his ghost going on, thinking himself alive, performing deeds of great valor, even returning home in triumph where he bought lands, begot sons, and lived in contentment for many years before discovering one day, by chance, that he was already dead.

There is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

Sometimes, I believe that this less material life [of dreams] is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

Ihre Hand ist an eurer Kehle, doch seht ihr Sie nicht.

Everything was shadowy pantomime, as if seen at a vast distance through some intervening haze—although on the other hand the newcomer and all subsequent comers loomed large and close, as if both near and distant, according to some abnormal geometry.

It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measureable 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 unnameable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.

Efficiunt Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant." —Lactantius

Kuranes had not lingered, but had plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal.

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal;

Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were real.

De modo que el buscador de paraísos no es mas que una víctima de mitos establecidos o de su propia imaginación.

Democracy is just a false idol — a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilizations.

Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?

The man of Truth is beyond good and evil," intoned a voice that was not a voice. "The man of Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The man of Truth has learnt that Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an impostor.

fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror

Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone.1 When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.

It is both more difficult and more complicated to die than people think.

Hvis man ser rigtig bedrøvet ud på gaden i den store verden, så kommer tykke mænd straks løbende og vifter med checkhæfte og engagerer én til cirkus. Sådan nogle lærer de at køre på en cykel, der går i stykker, når man forsøger at stige op, eller de lader dig spille med kosteskaft på stemmeløs fiol.

For him, the writer should be the very devil, a disturber of dreams and wrecker of fatuous utopias, the bringer-in of reality, and rival of God in his wish to make worlds.

The striking thing about the normal is that there is nothing normal about it: normality is the gentrification of ordinary madness—ask any Surrealist.