Quotes About Illusion

The map is not the territory," Snicket's chaperone advises him. "That's an expression which means the world does not match the picture in our heads.

There was a philosopher who said that all of life is just shadows. He said that people were just sitting in a cave, watching shadows on the cave wall. Aye - shadows of something much bigger and grander than themselves.

When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see that what had first appeared to be walls were large cardboard boxes stacked up in every available place, making the room seem smaller than it really was. The dark was real, though. It almost always is.

Truth can be dispensed with when fantasy dominates. p.63

Forever doesn't exist. The concept of it all is just a process, a thought we create to give us confidence in our choices, a promise before the end. Forever is like a blooming cherry blossom, beautiful even after the wind has blown it away from home to settle on the tainted ground below.

I was stuck in the feeling that one did not--was not justified in being alive unless one was fulfilling other people's dreams, whether they were contractual dreams or the public's dreams, or fulfilling my own dreams and illusions about what I thought I was supposed to be, which, in retrospect, turned out to not be what I am.

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about Strawberry Fields forever

There is only what is and that's it. What should be is a dirty lie.

It is indeed strange that we find it so difficult to welcome...the blissful nature of the loss of the power of selfhood—a power it was, in any case, always an illusion to think we possessed.

We find we have little to guide us in our search and must put trust in the only power we have, that natural instinct that propels us toward creation, choice, liberation and change. We must yield to the challenge of becoming fully human and trust in our human processes in the hope that they will lead us there. Out challenge then is clear, to make as much of the illusion as possible a reality. After all, our reality is not more than what was once our illusion.

We find we have little to guide us in our search and must put trust in the only power we have, that natural instinct that propels us toward creation, choice, liberation and change. We must yield to the challenge of becoming fully human and trust in our human processes in the hope that they will lead us there. Our challenge then is clear, to make as much of the illusion as possible a reality. After all, our reality is no more than what was once our illusion.

She [Anna] was doing what she always did when she saw him [Vronsky]—comparing the image of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, and impossible in reality) with him as he was.

Acting is a form of deception, and actors can mesmerize themselves almost as easily as an audience.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid things, and you see only charm. And if a handsome woman does not say stupid or horrid things, you at once persuade yourself that she is wonderfully clever and moral.

Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?

False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you.

We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?

Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.

In a world where the people are numbed and distracted, the only thing that sells is the unbelievable.

Drinking also maroons you without provisions on the island of self. Like most other promises it makes, alcohol's vow of kinship, that it will bridge your life to others, smooth the way, proves false. Fooled again: you're alone.

There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.