Quotes About Illusion

On 10 August 1914, five days after war was declared, Henry James, in a letter to a friend, expressed his revulsion at the prospect of war, and articulated the illusion that had preceded it: `Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared the wreck of our beliefs that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible.

Supreme beauty suddenly revealed is apt to strike us as a possible illusion playing with our desire—instant freedom with it to strike us as a possible rashness. This fortunately

Bedizened in this unnatural garb Rosalind stood before the mirror, plunging a long look into its depths and reading heaven knows what audacious visions.

Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation—in the face now of Jim's silence in particular—but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real?

ignis fatuus.

I am convinced that we are living in a fool's paradise, that the ground is heaving under our feet. It's not the ground my dear; it's you that are turning somersaults, Madame Grandoni interposed. Ah, you, my friend, you have the happy faculty of believing what you like to believe. I have to believe what I see.

Then it hasn't been love, said May Bartram. Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that--I've taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable, he explained.

Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.

From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity - creation.

It is our destiny to live with the wrong as well as the right kind of citizens, and to learn from them, the wrong-minded ones, as much or more as from others. If we have not yet succeeded -after how many centuries?- in eliminating from life the elements which plague us perhaps we need to question life more closely. Perhaps our refusal to face reality is the only ill we suffer from, and all the rest but illusion and delusion. (p.26)

I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed but my illusions(...)

Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as vice-president. It's all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a fiasco from start to finish.

I do not believe in words, no matter if strung together by the most skillful man: I believe in language, which is something beyond words, something which words give only an adequate illusion of.

Maybe I only thought I was in love. Maybe I was simply hungry, lonely, a clay pigeon any one could put away with a toy pistol.

From the time you wake up until the moment you go to bed it's all a lie, all a sham and a swindle. Everybody knows it, and everybody collaborates in the perpetuation of the hoax. That's why we look so goddamned disgusting to one another.

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.

What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit.

A good lie reveals more than the truth can ever reveal.

We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I couldn't recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean.

decidí dejarme llevar por la corriente, no oponer la menor resistencia al destino, como quiera que se presentase. Nada de lo que me había ocurrido hasta entonces había bastado para destruirme, nada había quedado destruido, salvo mis falsas ilusiones (...)

Hay algo venenoso en eso! Es tan fantástico que parece convincente

Looking at a fragment of The Millennium the other day, I pointed out . . . how hallucinatingly real were the oranges.

On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.