Quotes About Illusion

El pasado no es real. Sólo es un sueño.

I suddenly thought again: as a writer, you're always hearing things that aren't there.

The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.

I hear it, can actually feel, can even make out the letters of the message hovering above Bono's head in orange wavy letters: "I … am … the … devil … and I am … just … like … you …

This is my reality. Everything outside of this is like some movie I once saw.

The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I am simply not there.

All it comes down to is: I feel like shit but look great.

Is that your real name? Does it really matter? It makes me wonder what else is not real.

I concentrate on the Absolut and cranberry I'm holding and it looks like a glassful of thin, watery blood with ice and a lemon wedge in it.

We'll slide down the surface of things...

If free will is an illusion, and if time travel to the past is possible, then your inability to prevent your parents from meeting poses no puzzle. Although you feel as if you have control over your actions, the laws of physics are really pulling the strings.

The overarching lesson that has emerged from scientific inquiry over the last century is that human experience is often a misleading guide to the true nature of reality.

In Plato's parable of the cave, our senses are privy only to a flattened, diminished version of the true, more richly textured, reality. Maldacena's flattened world is very different. Far from being diminished, it tells the full story. It's a profoundly different story from the one we're used to. But his flattened world may well be the primary narrator.

We could be dreaming all the time, but we do not perceive those dreams while we are awake because consciousness (like the sun obscuring stars during the day) is much too brilliant to allow the unconscious content so much definition.

The universe is our picture. Only the immature imagine the cosmos to be what they think it is.

There is no reality -- only our own order imposed on everything.

Assumptions are a transparent grid through which we view the universe, sometimes deluding ourselves that the grid is that universe. —COGITOR EKLO OF EARTH

A man cannot drink from a mirage, but he can drown in it.

Those who think they see most clearly are often more blind than the rest.

Some lies are easier to believe than the truth. —Orange Catholic Bible

Was it magic? Of course it was.

But lies have a life of their own and are harder to kill than either men or unicorns.

What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.