Quotes About Illusion

One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

True knowledge is not to be had solely through a combat against error, bad faith and untruth, but more generally, through a combat against the illusions inherent in the sensible world.

She always seemed dead anyway, but nicely so, like an illustration or an advertisement.

Tony no abrió los ojos. Cualquiera que diga que sabe cómo te sientes es un iluso.

Dreams are great magicians.

The illusion that there might be a single, correct, absolute answer independently of context, purpose and perspective, that is independently of the relevant interface, leads to paradoxical nonsense.

What fools these mortals be.

He photographed it, but it was kind of hard to make it out, like those 3D pictures I just can't do, Duck Family Rescued From Pool, the fact that the Ackroyds kept finding dead field mice in their little pond, the fact that they came to drink and fell in and couldn't get out, the fact that they should've put in some little mouse stairs.

Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.

Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth.

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.

Truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is, in fact, held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.

Y sin duda nuestro tiempo... prefiere la imagen a la cosa, la copia al original, la representación a la realidad, la apariencia al ser... lo que es 'sagrado' para él no es sino la ilusión, pero lo que es profano es la verdad. Mejor aún: lo sagrado aumenta a sus ojos a medida que disminuye la verdad y crece la ilusión, hasta el punto de que el colmo de la ilusión es también para él el colmo de lo sagrado

But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence [...] truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to 'be the highest degree of sacredness.

A] faith which does not believe what it fancies it believes[.]

the present age... prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence... truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is, in fact, held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.

T]hese days illusion only is scared, truth profane. … [S]acredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to highest degree of sacredness. Religion has disappeared, … for it has been substituted … the appearance of religion[.]

La religion est le rêve de l'esprit humain

In Lucretius, sexual desire is considered real and genuine, whereas love is illusory. Venus, the goddess who represents the power of sexual desire, is the font of love. She merely mocks lovers with mental images. Try as they might, lovers cannot satisfy themselves by gazing nor by rubbing against one another because the madness of love will always return; hence Lucretius' prescription to flee the mental images, that is, to ward off what feeds love, turning the mind elsewhere.

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

Hope and reality lie in inverse proportions.