Quotes About Illusion

The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper, and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.

Her garbage had lied to me.

he was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind.

I will tell you. This place stinks. This isn't iDEATH at all. This is just a figment of your imagination. All of you guys here are just a bunch of clucks, doing clucky things at your clucky iDEATH.

She was a perfect freeway Mona Lisa.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.

Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: 'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

that childlike inability to distinguish what is true from what we'd like to be true.

Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection

I, like you, see through all the smoke and mirrors, but come on, guys, think of the poor dears who can't handle the truth!

Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification.

A brain that is good at simulating models in imagination is also, almost inevitably, in danger of self-delusion.

A consciência de que temos apenas uma vida deveria torná-la ainda mais preciosa. A visão ateísta reafirma e melhora a vida, e ao mesmo tempo nunca é afetada pela auto-ilusão, pelo excesso de otimismo ou pela autopiedade chorosa daqueles que acham que a vida lhes deve alguma coisa.

But what reality was ever made by realists?

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here...

My only idea ever, Dorrigo had confessed, is to advance forward and charge the windmill. Taylor had laughed, but Dorrigo had meant it. It's only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It's believing in reality that does us in every time. He

Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.

he understood the measure of his life now to be his capacity to believe in something - anything - other than what was happening in front of him. So they saw, but they did not see; so they heard, but they did not hear; and they knew, they knew it all, but still they tried not to know.

A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.

It's odd how our fears, the ones we didn't know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.