Quotes About Illusion

Phantoms do not wear round hats.

Table talk and amorous talk are equally impossible to grasp; amorous talk is all pretty bubbles, table talk, hot air.

Soit dit en passant, c'est une chose assez hideuse que le succès. Sa fausse ressemblance avec le mérite trompe les hommes.

Remplacer la pensée par la rêverie, c'est confondre un poison avec une nourriture.

God must not be judged from appearances. Beneath the gilding of heaven I perceive a poverty-stricken universe. Creation is bankrupt.

In this solitude there was also a heart that was all ready. Love had only to show its face; there was a temple there composed of greenery, of grass, of moss, of bird sighs, of soft shade, of agitated branches, and a soul made of gentleness, of faith, of candor, of hope, of aspiration, and of illusion.

El éxito es algo bastante repulsivo. El falso parecido que tiene con el mérito engaña a los hombres.

Sia detto alla sfuggita, il successo è una cosa piuttosto lurida; la sua falsa somiglianza col merito inganna gli uomini. Per la folla, la riuscita ha quasi lo stesso profilo della supremazia. Il successo, sosia della capacità, sa ingannare per bene la storia.

Théodule was, we think we have mentioned, the favourite of Aunt Gillenormand, who preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people permits us to imagine in them every perfection.

She wanted to daydream, pretend that her world was upright instead of fallen on its side;

hope felt like a borrowed sweater that didn't quite fit.

This will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves. —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Their whole relationship seemed to be made of air, filled with nothing.

But books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself.

It's just that I have seen firsthand that celebrity is not the utopia I'd imagined, and it has made me question my interpretations of the world around me.

Tonight, Mom painted a portrait of our family, and through her eyes I saw people I'd never imagined—a drunken, unfaithful husband and a depressed, overwhelmingly unhappy wife. How is it that I saw none of this? Are children so sublimely oblivious to their own world? She was right to hide this truth from me. Even now, I wish I didn't know it. Sometimes, knowing where we come from hurts more than we can stand.

Hope was a dangerous thief, stealing her todays for a tomorrow that would never come.

Let them believe that the fairy tales were the fiction, and that everything else was real.

Starting in the 1900s, from coast to coast and seven days a week, Americans more than anyone on Earth could immerse in the virtuosic fantasies created and sold by show business and the media. This was a new condition. As we spent more and more fabulous hours engaged in the knowing and willing suspension of disbelief, experiencing the unreal as real, we became more habituated to suspending disbelief unconsciously and involuntarily as well.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God." —MARK TWAIN, "Corn-Pone Opinions" (1901)

Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." —PHILIP K. DICK

This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.

A veces, ni yo mismo sé si algo es real o si lo he soñado. Si en el pasado eso ha ocurrido de verdad o no. Me pasa incluso con personas a las que conocía muy bien. Cuando hace muchos años que han muerto, acaba dándome la sensación de que jamás han estado en este mundo.