Quotes About Illusion

our minds wander off into all kinds of stories and fabrications and manufactured realities

All ego really is, is our opinions, which we take to be solid, real, and the absolute truth about how things are.

She was in love, as she quite saw, with a middle - aged man who said the same thing to all the girls, who had been a prince for an evening which he'd most likely forgotten already, who had given her a ring with a redcurrant in it and who cared, to the exclusion of all else, for his work.

Behind and byond her looks,her manner, there had been some dark malaise. But nobody ever saw it, back then, he thought. All you saw was her face.

One thing old age does is play tricks with time. Time

O brilho do diamante são as lágrimas dos trabalhadores da Companhia. A dureza do diamante é uma ilusão: não é mais que gotas de suor esmagadas pelas toneladas de terra que o cobrem.

How can I possess with my body, when I don't even possess my body? How can I possess with my soul, when I don't possess my soul? How can I understand with my mind, when I don't understand my mind? There is no body or truth we possess, nor even any illusion. We are phantoms made of lies, shadows of illusions, and our life is hollow on both the outside and the inside.

For any spirit of scientific bent, seeing more in something that is actually there is actually to see less. What you add in substance, you take away in spirit.

The outside world exists like an actor on a stage: it's there but it's pretending to be something else.

is reality simply a dream we share?

figuring out was is real isn't always possible, because our own brains are telling us stories

Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a body onto its banks, the cars or hedges in a suburban street where a murderer had left a victim, all of these things seemed at such times to be suddenly drained of meaning like an hallucination.

But didn't you know? Everything is made up.

The less you see, the more you can imagine.

An incongruity is a discrepancy, a dissonance, between what is and what 'ought' to be, or between what is and what everybody assumes it to be.

millions of people "deeply believed things that were verifiably untrue.

Reliable senses shared across all normal humans can be expected to deliver consensus. But it is also possible that we could have wide agreement without reliability; we might all be deluded in the same way. Some philosophers have thought that color vision is like this. Colors are not really out there in the world, even if we all experience them that way.

And then I realize that maybe not so much has changed as we all thought, that maybe the whole idea of progress is a paradox, a rocking horse that goes forward and back, forward and back, but stays in the same place, giving only the comforting illusion of motion.

A bad dream. You were having a bad dream. Oh, I say. Is that what I'm having?

There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control.

Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.

Feelings, like waves, look more substantial than they are.

Byron had to blink a dozen times, each time hoping the dream would end. But the unreal was real.

Fantasies hurt. They hurt hard and deep. They lifted you up to places that you could never reach, then they let you down with a crash.