Quotes About Illusion

All magicians lie and this one more than most

the more apparatus a magician carries about with him — coloured powders, stuffed cats, magical hats and so forth — the greater the fraud you will eventually discover him to be!

They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic – nor ever done any one the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one's head. But, with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlemen in Yorkshire.

Pero los sueños atraviesan los muros de piedra, iluminan las habitaciones vacías y oscurecen las iluminadas, y los personajes que intervienen en el sueño entran y salen a placer, burlándose de los cerrojos.

Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don't you think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy that the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part, I hate boating and I hate the water...

I should tell you all with pleasure,' said the General, 'but you would not believe me.' 'Why should I not?' he asked. 'Because', he answered testily, 'you believe in nothing but what consists with your own prejudices and illusions. I remember when I was like you, but I have learned better.

Ever seen the old conjurer's trick of a lady sawn in half? There's a strong aroma of sawn lady about this...don't you smell it?

The trouble with you, dear, is that you think an angel of the Lord as a creature with wings, whereas he is probably a scruffy little man with a bowler hat.

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

We are born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion that for the moment we are not alone." I suppose I was right. Because there I am—most certainly dead and clearly alone. The irony isn't lost on me. I can assure you of that. Yet there is also something else important I want you to take away. I made my living as an actor and film director. My career was built on creating illusions for others and myself.

Men in suits look successful until… you find out they work for the man in sweats"

Like true philosophers I've come to believe that religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown after proper education.

Doors, windows, walls…none of those mattered to a ghost. I'd read plenty of Goosebumps. I knew these things.

Young men, romantics, call it love at first sight, but even then I understood it was only prettiness. Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you'll be onto you till you're so weighed down you can't move.

William knows that science and magic are the same thing; magic is only science that hasn't been explained yet. Tonight he has made chemistry into magic for her.

Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the characters involved, you don't – you get all the benefits of having a relationship, with none of the mess.

Part of him believes he's still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination, and that one day he'll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

this world is not what it seems, open our hearts and let them bleed into the open seas, for there is peace".

People actively seek to filter out painful stimuli, and while this may help them limit distress, it can also sharply distort their actual environment. "If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves," wrote Aldous Huxley, "it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

Late at night, my friend Boris and I stood by the tracks and the train passed with orange lights in all its windows but not a single passenger head to be seen. Where are the passengers? I asked. The train is empty? Oh, they are there, you just don't see them. They're on the floor. There used to be snipers all along the tracks and so there are stretches of the rails where people all lie down on the floor so they won't be shot.

It's a hard fact, Daughter, but pretend love feels better than no love at all.

Because it wasn't just the death of a sweet little beast we were marking—it was the death of what we thought we'd been doing, where we'd thought we were living, the death of being able to believe anymore in our innocence and the existence of goodness around us.

Freedom was an illusion even when one's instincts were good.

We tend to make up the people we fall in love with