Quotes About Illusion

In the end we are being driven by history, all the while thinking that we are doing the driving.

major ramification of the ludic fallacy: how those whose job it is to make us aware of uncertainty fail us and divert us into bogus certainties through the back door.

One has the illusion of stability, but is fragile; the other one the illusion of variability, but is robust and even antifragile.

They only knew enough math to be blinded by it.

A distortion is meant to bring about an enhancement for your aesthetic experience.

The floor of the Parthenon is curved in reality so we can see it as straight.

Facts are the barren branches on which we hang the dear, obscuring foliage of our dreams.

Pretty' doesn't mean 'good,' you know, Geneva. Real life isn't like fairy tales. 'Pretty' simply means that by accident you've got things arranged on your outside in an extra-pleasing manner. It doesn't tell a thing about your inside.

Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?

Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play.

when a self-doubting, insecure person blindly persists in counterproductive behavior, clings to the illusory safety of compulsive inflexibility, and blames all misfortune on someone else.

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.

When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived.

Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothing within his grasp.

Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues, before I could see her as she really was.

Ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical.

Many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later, --oftener sooner than late,-- is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

Thou are my only reality-- all other people are but shadows to me: all events and actions, in which thou dost not mingle, are but dreams.

Little, impalpable worlds, were those soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface.

What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!

That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.

Yes! - these were her realities - all else had vanished!