Quotes About Illusion

Suppose every photo of me ever taken was an infinitesimal piece? Every magazine ad, every negative, every frame of motion picture film - another tiny molecule of me, stolen away to feed an audience that is *never* satiated. And when someone is fully consumed - vampirized - they move on, still hungry, to pick their next victim by making him or her a star. That's why they're called consumers. ("Red Light")

If one is inflexible and devoted to an illusion of normalcy - stability, permanence, reality - then the break is always harsher. The more rules there are to violate, the more violations there will be, because what we call reality is an interpretative construct of the human mind; a reality we re-make every day to deny the howling nothingness of existence and the meaningless tragedy of life.

Sometimes it seems that a plan is a useful illusion until life figures out where you really should be headed.

it is a response to a reality beyond us. Far from being trapped in tribal illusions, we are liberated by transcendent truths.

Watching foreign affairs is sometimes like watching a magician the eye is drawn to the hand performing the dramatic flourishes, leaving the other hand-the one doing the important job-unnoticed.

We see trees - they see only posts and beams.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

Another woman claimed the Hydrolator chambers at EPCOT Center's Living Seas pavilion descended so fast, they damaged her eardrums. Disney merely demonstrated that the pseudo-elevators only give the illusion of descending and actually let guests off at the same elevation as when they entered.

The grass looks greener on the other side of the fence because you don't have to mow it. - David L. Bonar, First said by me circ. September 26, 1992 (about age 50).

The human brain has a deceptive habit of filling in missing information and ignoring new information that doesn't fit the expectation.

replaced by a detail posted on a Web page, which may be more accurate but is probably less true. Gone is the friend you knew from home. Gone is the sled and the lake and the winter. Gone are the stories that existed in the gap between imagining and knowing and, with them, the distance that turned the particular into the universal and the mundane into the romantic.

Life often looks its best from a distance.

the financial market is not something that exists like you or I, Karin, or this bottle of water on the table. The moment we stop believing in it, it ceases to exist.

Life often looks its best from a distance. He was yet to understand that.

Life is constantly treating us to illusory connections.

over-inflated expectations

You could reach for him, and sometimes you would grab hold of him. But sometimes all you would grab hold of was a reflection of a reflection in a revolving door.

Sometimes when you look in his eyes you get the feeling that someone else is driving.

America is the only country where a significant proportion of the population believes that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked.

Self-deception is an indispensable element of war, and that despite the fact that wars are calculated and planned, there is a sense in which human beings do not know what they are doing when they cut one another down on the battlefield.

We are fooled by the winners because the winners can rewrite history.

It's called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.

This is no world. It is God Himself. In delusion we call it world.

Faith is essentially intolerant ... essentially because necessarily bound up with faith is the illusion that one's cause is also God's cause.