Quotes About Illusion

Do not engage to find things as you think they are.

petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

When the far mountains are invisible, the near ones look the higher.

Foolish people imagine that what they imagine is somewhere else. That stuff is not made in any factory but their own.

If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairty tale from the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred modern improvements; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.

Blue is light seen through a veil.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale

If we have had the seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits.

By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.

Os homens trabalham à sombra de um erro, lançando ao solo para adubo o que têm de melhor. Por uma sina ilusória, vulgarmente chamada necessidade, desgastam-se a amontoar tesouros que a traça e a ferrugem estragarão e que surgem ladrões para roubar. É uma vida de imbecis, como perceberão ao fim dela, se não antes.

F]or who ever heard of a Gold-finder that had the Impudence or Folly to assert, from the ill Success of his Search, that there was no such thing as Gold in the World? Whereas the Truth-finder, having raked out that Jakes his own mind, and being there capable of tracing no Ray of Divinity, nor any thing virtuous, or good, or lovely, very fairly, honestly, and logically concludes, that no such things exist in the whole creation.

men are strangely inclined to worship what they do not understand. A grand secret, upon which several imposers on mankind have totally relied for the success of their frauds.

as the sister often foresaw what never came to pass, so the brother often saw much more than was actually the truth.

característica esencial de la inflación es infundir aliento a miles de engañosas ilusiones.>

He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.

I keep a band of music in my ante-room, he said once to her. It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing's going on within.

I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.

Oh, it was a trap — not designed but deep — to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever in me was most excitable.

There's no romance here but what you may have brought with you.

It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep.

But even while they pretend to be lost in their fairy-tale they're steeped in their vision of the dead restored to them.

She lost herself in infinite dismay when she thought of the magnitude of his deception.

He should see nothing, he should learn nothing; for him she would always wear a mask.