Quotes About Illusion

Fame is a silly business. People who chase it are almost always going to be disappointed.

I have very mixed feelings about the movie business, and about Los Angeles in general.

Worldly relationships are not true [are not real] it is a 'business arrangement'.

I built them what they wanted and I made a profit off of it. Now they call me a god...What fools these mortals be.

Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It's a big business, I am told.

Vision without an Action is Illusion. Action without a Vision is Confusion.

We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business.

Build it and they will come' is one of the most idiotic ideas conceived by man.

By [age] 93, I had shrunk quite a lot. My car was known as the Phantom Cadillac. People would see it whizzing by and they would swear there was no driver.

People on horses look better than they are. People in cars look worse than they are.

When I was living on the street I would be standing out in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater, leaning against my car and signing autographs and nobody had any idea that I was living in it.

At root fame is a sham. I'm not going to live forever and if I am I certainly need don't you to tell me that so that I will buy a car or a box of dried up crackers.

I have a car that I call Flattery because it gets me nowhere.

This car was a very pretty lie.

But i was high, when i finally had the chance to see, everything thats pretty aint' always good for me.

More simply, regard everything as a dream. Life is a dream. Death is also a dream, for that matter; waking is a dream and sleeping is a dream. Another way to put this is, "Every situation is a passing memory.

The underlying addiction is to this dream of lasting pleasure and comfort.

Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion—not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.

We fear losing our illusion of security—that's what makes us anxious.

We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That's the essence of samsara—the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.

BY WEAVING our opinions, prejudices, strategies, and emotions into a solid reality, we try to make a big deal out of ourselves, out of our pain, out of our problems. But things are not as solid, predictable, or seamless as they seem.

Because we mistake what is impermanent to be permanent

we habitually string our thoughts together into a story that tricks us into believing that our identity, our happiness, our pain, and our problems are all solid and separate entities. In fact, like thoughts, all these constructs are constantly changing

The irony is that we make up the eight worldly dharmas. We make them up in reaction to what happens to us in this world. They are nothing concrete in themselves. Even more strange is that we are not all that solid either. We have a concept of ourselves that we reconstruct moment by moment and reflexively try to protect. But this concept that we are protecting is questionable. It's all "much ado about nothing"—like pushing and pulling a vanishing illusion.