Quotes About Illusion

The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone. Although our selves may be illusory creations of consciousness, our pain is nonetheless real.

For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

the finale is always the same: simple heart failure. And all the time you thought that life was so complex.

What was that all about!' (In this sense the world of the company mirrored the world itself, which sometimes managed to stage a rousing first act, and perhaps even provide a few engaging scenes of a second before devolving into a playwright's nightmare, wherein the actors either butchered their lines or entirely forgot them, scenery collapsed, props misfired, and most of the audience left the theater during intermission.)

Life is a nightmare that leaves it's mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.

All supernatural horror depends on a confusion of what we believe should be and should not be. As scientists, philosophers, and spiritual figures have attested, our heads are full of illusions; things, including human things, are frequently not what they seem…No one can prove that our existence is a paradox and a horror. Everything is alright with the world.

The look of the world's a lie, a face made up O'er graves and fiery depths, and nothing's true But what is horrible. If man could see The perils and diseases that he elbows Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him, Which fall behind and graze him as he passes, Then would he know that life's a single pilgrim Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers

In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren't liable to get stuck.

There is no way around the reality that students are too often wasting their money and obtaining the illusion of an education by gravitating toward courses or majors that either shouldn't exist or whose enrollments should be restricted to the small number of students who intend to pursue them seriously and with rigor. This, too, is one of the many things faculty are not supposed to say out loud, because to resentful parents and hopeful students, it sounds like baseless elitism. It

They were about a foot tall, and something about their matching size and identical bandit masks, coupled with their misjudgment of aspens as an escape route, gave me a sense of real glee at the originality of things.

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.

He [Ludwig Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: "Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?" I replied: "I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth." "Well," he asked, "what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?" —ELIZABETH ANSCOMBE,

Ground not upon dreams you know they are ever contrary.

Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgements, And should give certain judgement what they see; But they are rash sometimes, and tell us wonders Of common things, which when our judgments find, They can then check the eyes, and call them blind.

Like Dead Sea fruits, that tempt the eye,But turn to ashes on the lips.

My only booksWere woman's looks,And folly's all they've taught me.

The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.

Because certainty isn't the same as truth. It just means you're really, really deluded.

There may or may not be an external world, and if there is it may or may not be completely different from how it seems to you—there's no way for you to tell. This view is called skepticism about the external world.

Impressions and appearances that do not correspond to reality must be contrasted with others that do correspond to reality, or else the contrast between appearance and reality is meaningless.

Beauty is only skin deep.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

[Burke] is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.

long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT