Quotes About Illusion

This magical night seemed unreal, or rather, as real as a dream.

I was just going to tell you that I'm really willing to change. That's one thing about me; I've always been open to change." "That," said Socrates, "is one of your biggest illusions. You've been willing to change clothes, hairstyles, women, apartments, and jobs. You are all too willing to change anything except yourself, but change you will.

His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.

the world often seemed more like a template for fiction than something that should be indulged in for its own sake.

We come into this world alone, We depart alone,    This also is illusion. I will teach you the way Not to come, not to go!

Are we all illusions? Brief shadows thrown on a white wall for the shallow amusement of bored gods? Is this all?

Dale stepped over to the large console radio and wrestled it away from the wall. The inside was empty. No wires, no tubes, no lights for the dial, no works at all. Dale looked at the interiors of the other radios he'd listened to over the past two months. All empty.

There was just a speck in the center of this T-shirt. But the speck grew larger—became a shirtless man walking toward the viewer—and pretty soon you could see the rapidly approaching man's face. Vladimir Putin.

All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.

I had no illusions that now, in some final and dramatic flash of revelation, we would understand one another. We were done. It was a fact of my life--intractable and sad--that our relationship had been a failure. Still, with her prognosis came one last chance to be her daughter. [p. 163]

Years vanish. Months collapse. Time is like a tall building made of playing cards. It seems orderly until a strong gust of wind comes along and blows the whole thing skyward. Imagine it: an entire deck of cards soaring like a flock of birds.

It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.

So hypochondriac fancies represent Ships, armies, battles in the firmament; Till steady eyes the exhalations solve, And all to its first matter, cloud, resolve.

and I must be allowed to say of both, I hope without breach of Charity, that they heard Voices that never spake, and saw Sights that never appear'd;

We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.

The problem gets compounded by what's called the "illusion of explanatory depth," where we feel confidence in our understanding of a complex system, but in reality have just superficial knowledge.

She didn't look like a girl who would ruin the whole thing at all.

Qué absolutamente erróneo es pensar que es de otra forma, que una caja de basura es un tesoro, que un chico que sonríe es sincero, que un momento agradable es una vida mejor.

Don't break my heart just yet, or ask me to lose my reverie on the sticky floor... let me believe I'm the guy they all paid to watch all big and mighty, in the dark where I guess I belong.

There is no cure for illusion. There is only the opportunity for discovery.

You'd think people would realize they're bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great.

Most often, couples who get together after months or years of online infatuation enact a twenty-first-century version of Icarus flying too close to the sun with his waxen wings: the real-life exposure quickly melts the fiber-optic cable that was holding the couple aloft, and they plummet into the sea, where they tend to flail about for a while, trying to rescue their former magic.

we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.