Quotes About Illusion

For more than twenty years, the bond market's complexity had helped the Wall Street bond trader to deceive the Wall Street customer. It was now leading the bond trader to deceive himself.

Ronan, for his part, couldn't quite believe how ordinary the people on Wall Street were. "It's a whole industry of bullshit," he said.

Maybe the mind's best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over and again in the draft you saw these crystal-clear pictures form in the minds of basketball experts which later proved a mirage.

If perception had the power to overwhelm reality in such a simple case, how much power might it have in a more complicated one?

Maybe the mind's best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.

Daryl Morey believed—if he believed in anything—in taking a statistically based approach to decision making. And the most important decision he made was whom to allow onto his basketball team. "Your mind needs to be in a constant state of defense against all this crap that is trying to mislead you," he said. "We're always trying to figure out what's a trick and what's real. Are we seeing a hologram? Is this an illusion?

Bodies are great, and I wouldn't go anywhere without mine, but sometimes they're so disappointing. If

To the little girl the house seemed a gigantic head, and she only a morsel of meat conveniently positioned in its gaping mouth. The front porch was that grinning mouth, the white porch railing its lower teeth, the ornamental wooden frieze above its upper teeth, the painted wicker chair on which she perched its green wagging tongue. Frances sat and rocked and wondered when the jaws would clamp shut.

A false sense of security is the only kind there is.

The miserable frequently believe that possession of power for its own sake is what has made others more content. They grab such power in many different ways and remain baffled as to why they are just as miserable as they were to begin with.

You spend your lives chasing that which is within you and that which you can find in any other human being - but you will not look for it there - you must follow more glamorous paths - to waste your time in order to discover that you have wasted your time.

He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.

People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who watches from an unknown location

in Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock.

He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.

Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

the grocery store poets do everything they can to encourage us in our willing suspension of disbelief.

The philosophical implications of predictive coding are deep and strange. The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories.

Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map—and not the only map.

Weed" is not a category of nature but a human construct, a defect of our perception.

binocular depth inversion illusion.

I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.

I always say beauty is only sin deep.