Quotes About Illusion

All is deceit. Nothing wears a true face or uses a true name. Nothing is as it appears to be, as if the whole universe were busily playing out a function, 'guised in cunning. The mad are sane, the blind can see, the sane are otherwise demented, good is evil, and up, for all I care, is down.

Pherhaps we are cursed', Karkasy told the empty fane, 'to crave something which does not exist. There are no gods, no spirits, no daemons. So we make them up, to comfort ourselves'.

Perhaps we are cursed," Karkasy told the empty fane, "to crave something which does not exist. There are no gods, no spirits, no daemons. So we make them up, to comfort ourselves.

This was the move that was supposed to sweep me away. She seemed a little out of practice. I guess life with Charley Royce hadn't exactly been the third reel of The English Patient. It had to be bad if Mickey Dolan was your back-up. Not to put Mickey down but he didn't strike me as the lover-boy type. Especially when he took out his teeth. The last time Mickey thought about pleasing anybody but himself was just before he discovered how to sniff glue.

Hope refuses to believe that the inevitable is so. What has always been and can't change is an illusion; if anything is true, it is that change is inevitable, not that the inevitable will not change. But evil caustically replies, Nonsense. It is what it is. You will only be more discouraged and frustrated until you accept reality.

Our minds sometimes see what our hearts wish were true.

You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell you: There is no bottom.

they sell dollar bills for seventy-five cents and take credit for how fast they're growing.

The happy!! awesome!! rhetoric masks the fact that beneath the covers, there is chaos.

Be aware that a halo has to fall only a few inches to be a noose.

Women can go on marrying and pretending that their boyfriends and husbands are Mr. Darcy or some RomCom dream man. But where's that going to get 'em? Besides divorce court?

the illusion of a group hallucination is achieved through the following mechanisms: expectation, anticipation, suggestion, and cross-infection that can begin prior to the hallucination, operate during the experience, and continue to modify the memories of the participants long afterward.

The truth about our lie. The truth about our lie? Or was it a lie about the truth? Truth and lies. Lies and Truths. Lielielielielie. Truthtruthtruththruthtruth.

Meadow found it riveting: what machines of comforting delusions we humans are. Our language, our words, our ever treading minds and interior thoughts, all of these to make an architecture of lies that even we almost believe. No wonder the world is such a mean place, each of us judging one another without seeing our own terrible cruelties.

Real luxurious people hate status. You don't look rich because you have a rich dress. When you look at a person, do you see the spirit or the sexiness or the creativity? Just to see a big diamond, what does it mean? It's all about satisfaction. I think it's horrible, this judgment based on money. It's all an illusion that you look better because you have a symbol of luxury. Really, it doesn't bring you anything. It's so banal.

Fostering magical thinking, the chivalric romance yields a space-time in which the marvelous co-exists at all times with mundane routines. Its magic is able to envision the invisible, to endow the amorphous with palpable shape, and to place illusion and reality on the same level. Concurrently, the romance reminds us that it is essential to value the magical realm's irreducible alterity and inscrutability, rather than attempt to tame it by rationalizing its wonders.

They spoke of the crowds that had filled the plaza: the people, always myopic, always easy to fool.

The trouble is the kind of guy I want to go out with doesn't even exist... Like a rugged, chain-smoking, intellectual, adventurer guy who's really serious, but also really funny and mean...

As a kid, I kind of spent my life being amazed by being tricked. I love being tricked. I still love it today.

The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.

I had been tricked once by that Cheat called love, but the Game was over...

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope.

But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference.