Quotes About Illusion

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet—a rosy, warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness.

If men only knew the staleness of the freshest of us! that nine times out of ten the first love they think they are winning from a woman is but the hulk of an old wrecked affection, fitted with new sails and re-used.

I thought you were the ghost of yourself.

Corporeal presence is sometimes less appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real.

He could in this way be one thing and seem another: for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the husband to look at the wife; be eager to pay and intend to owe.

Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.

Sanity and apparent rationality are not the same, comrade.

IMAGINATION therefore is nothing but decaying sense; and is found in men, and many other living Creatures, as well sleeping, as waking.

But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves. This is the sole principle at work in hell. Lucifer chose to believe it; or, since it is unimaginable that he actually could have believed it, then we may say that he chose to pretend it might be. Very well, says Truth, you may pretend this. But the pretense will be, literally, your undoing. It will unmake you. You will have opted for something that is not, namely, a lie. Hell is built of lies.

Big Hat No Cattle

Castles in the Air My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone I build My castles in the air. I dwell not now on what may be: Night shadows o'er the scene: But still my fancy wanders free Through that which might have been.

You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.

It was the smile of Narcissus bending over the water mirror, the deep, enchanted, protracted smile with which he stretched out his arms to the reflection of his own beauty, an ever so slightly contorted smile—contorted by the hopelessness of his endeavor to kiss the lovely lips of his shadow—and coquettish, inquisitive and mildly pained, beguiled and beguiling.

The little hand on time's clock trips away as though measuring seconds; but God knows how much time it is covering when it whisks round heedless of the divisions it passes over! So much is certain, that we have been up here for years. Our brains reel, surely this is an evil dream, though dreamed with nor hashish nor opium; a censor of morals would rebuke us for it.

You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.

The average man thinks that a little falseness goes with beauty.

For happiness, he told himself, isn't being loved; that was just a slightly nauseous satisfaction of vanity. Happiness is loving and perhaps seizing a few short illusory moments of intimacy with the object of one's love.

what time actually is--nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale, for the purpose of keeping people from cheating.

En faisant de la personnalité un mystère, vous courez le risque d'incliner à l'idolâtrie. Vous vénérez un masque. Vous voyez une mystique où il n'y a que mystification.

Le temps n'a aucune réalité. Lorsqu'il vous paraît long, il est long, et lorsqu'il vous paraît court, il est court, mais de quelle longueur ou de quelle brièveté, c'est ce que personne ne sait.

a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall

Era la sonrisa de Narciso al inclinarse sobre el agua.

A felicidade é amar e talvez colher pequenas aproximações ilusórias da pessoa amada.

sentia a distância que o separava dela, pois seu modo de falar não era o dela. E mesmo assim era feliz, pois a felicidade, dizia para si mesmo, não é ser amado; isto é uma satisfação misturada com asco para a vaidade. A felicidade é amar e talvez colher pequenas aproximações ilusórias da pessoa amada.