Quotes About Illusion

It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.

I'm just a lie waiting to happen.

there can, we think, be little doubt of the proposition, that the external organs may, from various causes, become so much deranged as to make false representations to the mind; and that, in such cases, men, in the literal sense, really see the empty and false forms and hear the ideal sounds which, in a more primitive state of society, are naturally enough referred to the action of demons or disembodied spirits.

You remind me at this moment," said the young lady, resuming her lively and indifferent manner, "of the fairy tale, where the man finds all the money which he had carried to market suddenly changed into pieces of slate. I have cried down and ruined your whole stock of complimentary discourse by one unlucky observation.

Thus, in regard to the ear, the next organ in importance to the eye, we are repeatedly deceived by such sounds as are imperfectly gathered up and erroneously apprehended. From the false impressions received from this organ also arise consequences similar to those derived from erroneous reports made by the organs of sight. A whole class of superstitious observances arise, and are grounded upon inaccurate and imperfect hearing.

Why should you believe your eyes? You were given eyes to see with, not to believe with. Your eyes can see the mirage, the hallucination as easily as the actual scenery.

One of the most pernicious of folk-sayings is, 'I cannot believe my eyes!' Why particularly should you believe your eyes? You were given eyes to see with, not to believe with. Believe your mind, your intuition, your reason, your emotion if you like - but not your eyes unaided by any of these interpreters. Your eyes can see the mirage, the hallucination, as easily as the actual scenery.

Magic is the cheat codes for the world.

That means that the universe is two-dimensional. Matter, energy, time, you, me and the floor are holograms.

From his vantage, three steps back and to the right, Tallow could see Rosato's eye a good five inches outside Rosato's head and still attached to his eye socket by a mess of red worms. In that single second, Tallow abstractedly realized that in his last moment of life, James Rosato could see his killer from two different angles.

There are no good futures. There's nothing to head towards but more garish, unsustainable carnival acts.

It was like washing down a bucket of peyote with a vatful of absinthe.

Prediction is the best circus act of all. But it is just an act. It's a carny turn. Stop doing it.

Magic is the cheat codes for the world. Sending a signal to reality's operating system, see?

None of it seemed real. He laughed at Mount Hood, capped with silvered white in the middle of summer. Who paints a frosted mountaintop into a summer scene? What a ridiculous failure of reality. He stopped laughing when he remembered it was a failure of reality that put him in this car in the first place, and was quiet for a long time.

En la montaña de los Thunderbolts no todo es lo que parece, Andreas"- Piedra lunar.

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

In essence, I'm urging you to stop taking your life so personally. You can end any and all suffering by reminding yourself that nothing in the universe is personal. Of course you've been taught to take life very personally, but this is an illusion. Tame your ego, and absolutely free yourself from ever taking anything personally.

It's up to you to recognize that your belief that ego can control life is an illusion.

It's funny how you can think you know someone pretty well, and then something happens or they do something that makes you understand that you didn't really know them at all.

We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.

I had reached a level of sophistication at which I could know I was fooling myself and still fool myself.

The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

For a long time those who did not require relief entertained the illusion that those being aided were in need through some fault of their own. It is now pretty clear in the national mind that the unemployed are a cross-section of the workers, the finest people in the land"