Quotes About Illusion

Thought presents itself (stands in front) of us and pretends that it does not represent.

There is more empty space in the book you're holding, than book. The electrons in the atoms of the book are moving so fast, they give the illusion of solid ink on solid paper. It's not. It's just an illusion. If all the electrons would stop moving for even an instant, the book would not just crumble into dust, it would disappear. Poof

Some of what we learned early on turned out to be true (the earth is round; if you want a friend be a friend; cleanliness is next to impossible) and some of it turned out to be false (Santa Claus; the Tooth Fairy; Kansas is more fun than Oz).

Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politicians stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.

Like many things he had believed, it had all been an illusion, only true because he had been gullible enough to believe in it. In reality, it had all been as flimsy and fleeting as an optical illusion; it depended entirely on your point of view. In calendar time, perhaps, those days weren't so long ago, but in his memory they sometimes seemed as if they had been dreamed by another person in another century.

Was it the age of my innocence, Or was it the lost Land of Oz? Was it only a foolish illusion, The summer that never was?

Fool, he told himself. He had been looking for Keith Rothwell in Robert Calvert's flat. But he wasn't there. He wasn't anywhere; he was just a slab of chilled meat waiting for a man with his collar on the wrong way around to chant a few meaningless words that might just ease the living's fear of death until the next time it touched too close to home for comfort.

Bollocks!' said Burgess. 'They're shit-disturbers. You ought to know that by now. Why do you think they're interested in a nuclear-free Britain? Because they love peace? Dream on, Constable.

The truth is rarely as liberating as people would have us believe; it often binds more than it frees.

This is where it begins to get mind-bending. The colors we experience are just appearances in the mind. The light itself does not have color; it is simply energy with a particular frequency, the color coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind. The same is true of every other quality we experience. We seem to be experiencing the world directly, but in truth all that we experience is a representation of the world out there appearing in our field of knowing.

When rewritten in terms of the real world instead of the mysterious world of Mind, it made sense. 'Mind' was read as 'human self-consciousness'. The goal of history became the liberation of humanity; but this could not be achieved until the religious illusion had been overcome.

All of this could have happened, and some of it did, but not in that way.

Sometimes, it seems like sighted people can hardly see anything.

Everything here is a lie, Rose said. Just because you saw it doesn't mean it really happened. Tom nodded. He was curiously reluctant to take up this hope she offered. If he reached out, it might bite his hand.

In a Sufi fable, the elephant fell in love with a firefly, and imagined that it shone for no other creature but he; and when it flew long distances away, he was confident that at the center of its light was the image of an elephant.

Evil is a convenient fiction.

Shapeshifting in folklore is clearly connected with hallucination in morbid psychology.

The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth.

We need to keep in mind the distinction between realism and reality. To confuse the two is to lose sight of the difference between art and life.

Wrinkled women lifting their faces, chasing their youth. Fat men sucking in bellies. Poor folks putting on airs. Sinners acting like saints. All of us keeping pace with our companions, stepping lively in this dance of deceit.

dolphins are not the benevolent mammals we'd like them to be; those beaming faces hide the minds of assassins.

So I go to college and I'm standing there looking in the microscope. And there aren't even any paramecia in there at all, 'cause the slide moved. And the instruction is, 'Draw what you see.' And I realize that there's nothing there, nothing at all. But I can't consciously face the fact that this is a symbol of my whole projected four years there, I'm drawing pictures of things that -

A brand-new tape recorder, completely worn out. Bought with funny money that the store is willing to accept. Worthless money, worthless article purchased; it has a sort of logic to it.

maybe I have got to the point when I see something in everything, because I want to see something. The next thing, he thought, is voices. I'll start hearing voices. What can I count on? What can I believe?