Quotes About Illusion

We are gods in our dreams. Disaster strikes when we come to believe the same is true in our real lives.

So much had changed inside him. He was no believer in causes, not any more. Certainty was an illusion, a lie. Fanaticism was poison in the soul, and the first victim in its inexorable, ever-growing list was compassion. Who could speak of freedom, when one's own soul was bound in chains?

I, Sergeant Gesler of the 5th squad in the 9th Company of the 8th Legion, swear by the two Lords of Summer, Fener and Treach, that the creature before me is a natural, unaltered Birdshit scorpion – even though I know there's something about it I'm not seeing and I'm about to lose my life's savings on the Sergeants' Wager.

Exactly. Peace of mind." "Fatal delusion, you mean.

back away. As Sleem said, there is no value in despair. But plenty of despair in value, once the illusion is revealed.

He knew which world he wanted to live in. But, people didn't have that choice, did they? Not unless they killed the spark inside themselves first. With drink, with the oblivion of sweet smoke, but those were false dreams and made mockery of the ones truly lost – the ones whose lives had passed.

Truth cared nothing for stories. The real world was indifferent to what people wanted to be, to how they wanted everything to turn out.

Her worship was founded on denial, and in the absence of a true relationship with her goddess, she – like all those who had come before her – was free to invent every detail of that mock relationship.

He felt something crumbling inside him. A fortress in the desert of my heart, I should have known it would be a fortress of sand.

Madmen built houses of solid stone. Then circled looking for a way inside. Inside, where cosy perfection waited. People and schemes and outright lies barred his every effort, and that was the heart of the conspiracy. From outside, after all, the house looked real. Therefore it was real. Just a little more clawing at the stone door, a little more battering, one more pounding collision will burst that barrier. And on and on and round and round. The worn ruts of madness.

Running away never feels as fast, never as far, as it should.

And the good know only one truth. But it's a lie, because there's always more than one truth.

With sufficient distance, even a range of mountains could look flat, the valleys between each peak unseen. In the same manner, lives and deaths, mortality's peaks and valleys, could be levelled.

when there is a difference between perception and reality, perception always wins. Behind

There is no way to tell which version of a lie is the truth.

By this Orwellian logic, happiness is suffering and suffering is happiness.

the method is still the same: appeal to weakness, bolster myth, and massage fantasy.

Plastic people flashing fake smiles at a pretend world.

our minds can do strange things, can convince us of things that aren't real. Sometimes we see things that aren't really there, sometimes we don't see things that are. We're all experts at fictionalizing the truth.

You talk about deus ex machina, well, we're talking about deus in machina. You start by thinking there's a god in the box. And then you find there isn't anything in the box. You put the god in the box.

pipe dream." This term meant the same then as it does today, a way of describing an irrational sense of optimism. Irrational or not, this is opium's greatest gift to the smoker: boundless optimism—the kind that one rarely experiences beyond childhood. All good things seem possible; problems are easily solvable; obstacles are always surmountable.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

The more the mouse pursues this line of of thought, the more it seems to him that the cat is a large, soft mouse.

That's the problem with Domitian, isn't it?" said Lucius. "We never know what's real and what's not. All the city is a stage. Everything that happens is a spectacle put on by the emperor. One wonders if he himself knows any longer what's real.