Quotes About Illusion

But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real.

Oh, I know you. You're soft, like most men. You make up romances about people instead of seeing them as they are.

The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.

When the images of power overshadow the reality, those without power find themselves fighting phantoms.

Man's collective mastery of nature— even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion— can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life.

The illusion of feeling well-informed....a public that feels informed in proportion as it is to befuddled. In one of his characteristic pronouncements, at a press conference in May 1962, John F. Kennedy proclaimed the end of ideology in words that appealed to both these public needs-the need to believe that political decisions are in the hands of dispassionate, bipartisan experts and the need to believe that the problems experts deal with are unintelligible to laymen.

Routine feeds the illusion of safety...

Is it so hard for you to give up what you never had?

Slowly and gently, Augustus Brine explained to the king of the Djinn about the illusion created by motion pictures. When he finished, he felt like he had just raped the tooth fairy in front of a class of kindergartners.

Funny how the illusion of safety can make us careless.

like trying to follow a stream of black oil through a maze of shadows.

doch ihre Gegenwart hatte in ihm stets das Gefühl ausgelöst, daß seine eheliche Treue lediglich eine absurde Wahnvorstellung war.

You would be amazed how many magicians have died after being bitten by mad rabbits. It's far more common than you might think. -Angela the Herbalist

It's overwhelming. I feel as if I am living in an illusion a dream where all things are possible. Amazing things do happen I know but always to someone else always in some far off place and time.

Rooms that are bigger on the inside than the outside.…

whirlwinds of light spinning in caverns deep below the ground, men who age backward, stones that speak, and shadows that creep. Rooms that are bigger on the inside than the outside.… Galbatorix is not the only power in the world to be reckoned with

My whole life has been a lie! Since the moment I was born

What you wish for, what you most hope for - that is your greatest illusion.

Trust is like glass. You think you can see through it, that you know what's on the other side of it. You pretend you know your partner and that he knows you. But it's all an illusion. One day you bump against it and it cracks and you cut yourself and you bleed.

You're in love with your image of Linda. Mr. Green is in love with his image of Jesus. Both of your images have little to do with reality. Both of you are making yourselves miserable.' 'That's not fair, comparing me to him. You don't see me hammering nails in people.' 'You prefer to hammer them through your own hands.

Is there any training that can prepare you for this moment, being face-to-face with a human monster, a man who seems to glide placidly through the everyday world in a baseball cap, smelling of Old Spice while concealing a gallery of horrors beneath his garage, in the back of his truck, inside his mind?

What's the deal? To him, straight lines appear to be moving, because his retinas are not yet fixed.

Stripe felt frozen. To be so high and not high at all! It only looked good from the bottom.

that the facts often concealed the truth.