Quotes About Illusion

Vegas felt glamorous on the outside but disappointing on the inside.

The beauty of comedy is, when people come to a comedy club, there is a certain veil of reality suspended.

We're still talking about women's rights. We can't be the greatest country in the world. I think once we lose that illusionary veil of thinking that we are, we can face the problems and really try to fix them.

Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers.

If I close my eyes and think of Hollywood, all I see is one big varicose vein.

I think we live in delusional times, whether it's with a great ability to totally distract ourselves with technology, or with speed and the velocity of life.

A throne is only a bench covered with velvet.

Hope is tomorrow's veneer over today's disappointment.

The suburbs have this veneer of happiness, you know? This veneer of the ideal life. From afar, it's all together - white picket fence, nice house - but you peel away one little layer, and it all comes crumbling down.

All of Vegas is false. There's a false Paris, a false Venice, a false Baghdad - in fact, all of the early Vegas aesthetic is Baghdad, which is also the irony. It's 'Aladdin,' the sands, 'One Thousand and One Nights.'

Children are so used to seeing puppets that when they see a real ventriloquist they don't understand it.

You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.

To walk into the hall of mirrors of Versailles as Louis XIV and deliver a monologue on your own in an empty hall of mirrors is like no other experience.

If I can get a sanitized version of reality, I'll take it.

Scientology delivers what it promises under the guise of tearing away falsity, neuroses, psychoses. It creates a brainwashed, robotic version of you. It's a 'Matrix' of you, so you're communicating with people all the time using Scientology.

Nothing looked real; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could suddenly be removed. The world was waiting, holding its breath, making itself small -

A la vérité, il forçait un peu sur le sublime : c'était un homme du XIXe siècle qui se prenait, comme tant d'autres, comme Victor Hugo lui-même, pour Victor Hugo.

Nous, nous battions des paupières. Un clin d'Å"il, ça s'appelait. Un petit éclair noir, un rideau qui tombe et qui se relève : la coupure est faite. L'Å"il s'humecte, le monde s'anéantit. Vous ne pouvez pas savoir combien c'était rafraîchissant. Quatre mille repos dans une heure. Quatre mille petites évasions.

Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them . . . there is nothing.

My memories are like the coins in the devil's purse: when it was opened, nothing was found in it but dead leaves.

Suffering just means you're having a bad dream. Happiness means you're having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.

The you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it's just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into existence. Enlightenment isn't in the character, it's in the underlying truth.

Once you start seeing this place for the madhouse it is, you can't stop seeing it that way. It's everywhere, everyone. It doesn't make any sense. That's not life. It can't be. I don't know what it is, but it's not life.

all belief systems are just the stories we create in order to deal with the void. Ego abhors a vacuum, so everybody's scrambling to create the illusion of something where there's nothing. Belief systems are simply the devices we use to explain away the unthinkable horror of no-self.