Quotes About Illusion

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.

If I touch a burning candle I can feel no pain If you cut me with a knife It's still the same And I know her heart is beating And I know that I am dead Yet the pain here that I feel Try and tell me it's not real And it seems I still have a tear to shed

The word "see" is often used as a direct synonym for "understand"—"I see what you mean." Yet sometimes we see but we don't understand; worse, we see, then "understand" something that isn't true at all. Done well, a picture of data is worth the proverbial thousand words.

we don't ask what works, we simply gravitate to what sounds miraculous.

Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

Imagination is a killer.

Politics was manipulation. Like a magic show.

The whole world worked by subterfuge and the will to believe.

What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?

The world had kenneled a vicious lie in my brain…

A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry.

Holmes's experience in the war taught him not that all people have a right to freedom, but rather that claims about right and wrong are really only illusions.67 Ethical principles, he believed, are subjective, emotional commitments that cannot be judged right or wrong. Ideas such as justice or moral good are only the expressions of arbitrary personal preferences and are no more rational than a person's preference for one kind of beer over

Luck is merely an illusion, trusted by the ignorant and chased by the foolish

Truth only exists for those who cling to it. Sosuke Aizen

Hearts, you say? You Humans are always so quick to speak of such things. As though you carry your hearts in the very palms of your hands. But this eye of mine perceives all. There is nothing that it overlooks. If this eye cannot see a thing, then it does not exist. That is the assumption under which I have always fought. What is this heart? If I tear open that chest of yours, will I see it there? If I smash open that skull of yours, will I see it there?

The saying "survival of the fittest" is a smoke screen. It's to give the weak the illusion that they too can be predators if they try hard enough. You're not eaten because you're weak. You're eaten because there are fewer of you. Those that become predators are always…numerous…incompetent…and the loudest. You and everybody else realize that, but pretend not to see it.

And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood. That was just as well. The future was too fearful for contemplation, and beyond the expected, illusory finish lines were things fated by the decisions made this morning -- and, once decided, best unseen.

THERE IS NO such thing as magic. That was merely the word people used to explain something so cleverly done that there was no ready explanation for it, and the simplest technique employed by its practitioners was to distract the audience with one moving and obvious hand (usually in a white glove) while the other was doing something else.

There was reality, and then there was perception, and rarely the two shall meet.

No one knows what love is, he told me. If someone says they do, they're full of shit.

We're making it up. The world, the universe, life, reality. Especially reality.

Comedy is deemed inferior to tragedy primarily because of the social prevalence of narcissistic pathology. In other words people who are too self important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandosity.

You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn't last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind." That's how it is with dreams," said Priscilla. "They're the perfect crime.