Quotes About Illusion

Our lives are brief, they are like strings of illusions that die, like little bubbles in our entrails. We don't even know what game it's playing at with us, but we have nothing else. It's the only thing that's more or less certain on this earth.

We become familiar with the outsides of men, as with the outsides of houses, and think we know them, while we are ignorant of so much that is passing within them.

Life being full of harsh realities, we seek relief from them in a variety of pleasing delusions.

One of the greatest bores in life is a too knowing fellow, who sees through all delusions, and will never let you enjoy any of them, not even your favorite ones, no matter how agreeable they may be, but must be always waking you out of some delicious dream, only to tell you, "My dear sir, you are dreaming;" as if it were not both proper and natural to dream. He forgets that many things are pleasant only while the delusions which make them so last.

An illusion dissipated is an experience gained.

Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured, but, like the sun, only for a time.

There's this illusion that homosexuals have sex and heterosexuals fall in love. That's completely untrue. Everybody wants to be loved.

These fantasies about the future, based on the past, are the hope and hype we con ourselves with. Even if we get what we always wanted it never looks like we thought it would when it arrives.

Truthfulness about beliefs sets you free from unconscious domination by beliefs you have come to think are reality. Then, once you are free of the illusion that beliefs are real, you can choose to be consciously dominated by beliefs you know are not real.

Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.

It was easy to trust your own eyes, wasn't it? We all did. We weren't crazy. The other guy was. That was part of the human condition. We understand our own perspective too well. So

It comforts us to think that we have control when we don't.

If you judge the world by Facebook, you wonder why so many people take Prozac.

The goateed Sandy Duncan bustled over again. He spoke with a French accent that sounded about as real as Pepe LePew's. "Monsieur Zuckermahn?" Norm

Every house on every street is really just a family facade. We look at it and think we know what's going on inside, but we never really have any idea.

Exteriors, you learn, are temporal and illusionary and thus meaningless.

The oven was a prop, strictly for show, like a politician's Bible. Something

Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory

She thinks we were all killed when they made the Great Sweep, but I escaped in the mud.

When I leave here, will this shop vanish the way they do in the stories?" "I'm afraid so, yes." "Why do they always do that?" The old man sighed. "You know, you're the first one who ever asked me that." But

Oscar Wilde's "beautiful untrue things" that save the imagination from falling into "careless habits of accuracy.

The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.

The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools.

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?