Quotes About Illusion

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

A mask tells us more than a face.

Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn't possibly have happened.

The secret to life is to enjoy the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.

He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.

Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks.

The living always think that gold can make them happy

Sometime you will find, even as I have found, that there is no such thing as romantic experience; there are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance- that is all. Our most fiery moments of ecstasy are merely shadows of what somewhere else we have felt, or of what we long someday to feel

Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.

To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is.

It's that undefined something we're really afraid of-the flicker of movement we don't quite catch out of the corner of our eye, the bad dream we can't quite remember when we wake up, the sound of a door opening downstairs we thought we heard. And worst of all, the things we're not sure even happened, the things that we might just have imagined, that might mean we're going mad, all those nameless, nebulous things we can't quite put our finger on and can only guess at.

Yeah, like this one carny up in Fargo. It had a big sign saying 'See the Siamese twins,' and everybody pays a buck, thinking they're gonna see two people hooked together. And when they get there it's a cage with two Siamese kittens in it. Like that.

It's not regret for staying. It is nostalgia for something that we believe is true in our illusion, something we will never have. And if we touched it, we would soon realize that it was not what we dreamed of.

Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

Every day is a lie. But you are dying. That is not a lie.