Quotes About Illusion

Dans Horizons rouges, j'ai essayé de peindre la vie quotidienne à la cour d'un dictateur communiste. CeauÈ™escu rêve d'être vénéré comme un nouveau Roi-Soleil, être reconnu par l'Histoire comme le Napoléon roumain et sa femme fait des efforts désespérés pour être considérée comme la déesse roumaine de la sagesse et de l'élégance. (Préface à l'édition française)

Perchè l'uomo, per vivere, ha bisogno di un minimo di aria respirabile, di una certa dose di ossigeno e di illusioni.

I know that I am more intelligent, superior, more valuable where goodness is concerned than those men. They are strong but their strength is temporary and an illusion. It will be drained from them by time, defeat, the hand of fate, illness (as was the case with Napoleon). And everyone will be dumbfounded. "But how?" people will say. "They were the ones we were afraid of!

So much for 'tannis root'. Devil's Fungus.

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.

I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.

If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?

Your infatuation will end in tears.

Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.

Cuál es la diferencia que existe entre yo y estas pequeñas y humildes criaturas? La araña teje su tela, no puede hacer otra cosa. Yo tejo mi conciencia, esta charlatana compulsiva, esta voz vaga y errabunda que pronto enmudecerá. Pero todo es un sueño. La realidad es demasiado dura.

But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.

Of course we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life, in some ways especially there, it is hard to distinguish dream from reality. In ordinary human affairs humble common sense comes to one's aid. For most people common sense is moral sense. But you seem to have deliberately excluded this modest source of light. Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, and stories are false.

Tal como nos conocemos, somos objetos falsos, imposturas, ramilletes de ilusiones" "Los juicios sobre las personas no son jamás decisivos, surgen de resúmenes que inmediatamente hacen pensar en la necesidad de una reconsideración. Los arreglos humanos no son otra cosa que cabos sueltos y cálculos nebulosos, independientemente de cualquier cosa que para consolarnos pueda fingir el arte

I accused Hartley of being a 'fantasist', or perhaps that was Titus's word, but what a 'fantasist' I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.

All dreams are sinister.

But, and especially with Linda's help, he had decided that, like most other people, he was not made for reality.

Even what we are most certain of we know only in an illusory form.

I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains.

The trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women, whereas I, in spite of some appearances to the contrary, do not. I don't despise women. I was in love with all Shakespeare's heroines before I was twelve. But they don't exist, dear man, that's the point. They live in the never-never land of art, all tricked out in Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, and mock us from there, filling us with false hopes and empty dreams. The real thing is spite and lies and arguments about money.

I took him for a kind of buffoon. Now I see he is a devil.

I had the illusion of conversing with a fellow being without a barrier, without a steel door, without a black hood over my head . . . I have never, I think, impressed upon you how almost impossible I find it to communicate with anybody.

Extreme continuing unhappiness often consoles itself with images of death which may in a sense be idle, but which can play a vital part in consolation and also in the continuance of illusion. If that happens I am dead, consoles, and also dulls the edge of speculation and even of conscience. It is another way of saying, to me that cannot happen.

She tells so many different stories and they are all false.