Quotes About Illusion

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that worked on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn list of good intentions.

Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Our greatest illusion is reliance upon the security and permanence of material possessions. We must search for some other coin.

Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have ... the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality ... which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.

I know too well the poison and the sting Of things too sweet.

What shadows we are, what shadows we pursue!

We are never further from our wishes than when we imagine that we possess what we have desired.

All our geese are swans.

Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, storytellers dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.

I've had several years in Hollywood and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.

There is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture-in front of us-our own little mirage that we think is the future.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are has probably pervaded all ages.

The greater part of our lives is spent in dreaming over the morrow, and when it comes, it, too, is consumed in the anticipation of a brighter morrow, and so the cheat is prolonged, even to the grave.

What you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp.

My thoughts by night are often filled With visions false as fair: For in the past alone, I build My castles in the air.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

No one could be so wise as Thurlow looked.

This world's a bubble.

The pomps and vanity of this wicked world.

If all the world must see the world As the world the world hath seen, Then it were better for the world That the world had never been.

This world is all a fleeting show, For man's illusion given; The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow, - There's nothing true but Heaven.

Age 80. — In a dream you are never eighty.