Quotes About Illusion

If what we took to be objective reality was so fragile that it could be swept away by 400 milligrams of mescaline, then perhaps the vitalists who had argued that the brain was merely a mechanism to stabilize an anarchic world were correct. Perhaps the notion of objective reality was a paradox.

Absolute certainty is the greatest of all illusions.

The opening sentence of his latest book could have served as his personal motto: Absolute certainty is the greatest of all illusions.

The meds don't make the pain go away, they just take you to a different place. But everyone around you thinks you're no longer in pain so they feel better.

it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

We need a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us as to our ends, since ultimately we have never believed in them.

Hell of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning...

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

All we have left of liberty is an ad-man's illusion.

The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending

At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.

Take your desires for reality! can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.

Pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary.

When you take away verisimilitude, you do not automatically find the veridical but, perhaps, the implausible.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

The feminine seduces because it is never where it thinks it is, or where it thinks itself.

So, there is no longer striking, nor work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else: a magic of work, a trompel'oeil, a scenodrama (so as not to say a melodrama) of production, a collective dramaturgy on the empty stage of the social.

What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.

We live of seduction, but die Fascination

Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theater, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.