Quotes About Illusion

Reality disappoints regularly. When people are supposed to have fun, it's likely they won't, because fun can't live up to its image. Does anything live up to its image?

Myths and superstitions have power over us only to the extent that we believe them, but when we believe, we live completely under their spell

We can't live in an alternate reality and expect what's right in front of us to get better.

Secret worship is all about something in this world that seems so attractive on the outside but will devour you on the inside.

Finally, when all was said and done, the certainty (so often experienced, yet always new) that female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when you're hungry and disgust you when you've had your fill.

Originality is merely an illusion.

My work is a game, a very serious game.

A person can only be born in one place.However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare.Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace... with life.

Perception of a state is not the state.

After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence.

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

One man's ugliness can blind another to the world's magic.

I think beauty can be a great lie. Sometimes the greatest lie.

With a hologram, like when your teacher is one of them, if you aren't looking right at them, they sometimes seem to be hollow. You see them and suddenly they don't have a face that pokes out. Their faces poke in, their nose and so on, and there is nothing inside them. If you don't look right at them, they can look just like an empty shell.

they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

M.T. Anderson

Zhukov was stunned. Unlikely as it might seem, most of the Leningrad tank force was made up of motionless decoys, nailed together by Shostakovich's colleagues in the set-design team at the Mariinsky Theater.

How can we ever tell what the world really looks like? On a misty day, even the hills of Elfland are gray and dismal. Look through a gemstone, and the dullest street sparkles. I have had both my eyes put out by goblins, and so, for me, the world is profoundly dark. --- Lemuel of Chartibrande, On the Elfin Sciences & Magical Arts

How can we ever tell what the world really looks like? On a misty day, even the hills of Elfland are gray and dismal. Look through a gemstone, and the dullest street sparkles. I have had both my eyes put out by goblins, and so, for me, the world is profoundly dark.

they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

I considered the case and realized that if something can exist in opinion without existing in reality, or exist in reality without existing in opinion, the conclusion is that of the two parallel lives, only opinion is necessary – not reality, which is only a secondary consideration.

The pleasures of the world are deceitful; they promise more than they give. They trouble us in seeking them, they do not satisfy us when possessing them and they make us despair in losing them.

whole countries lived behind barbed wire, and governments insisted that down was up and black was white.