Quotes About Illusion

The hippopotamus is invisible in water.

We are all hopelessly addicted to the delusion that we are in control of anything.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

The Mask Always a mask Held in the slim hand whitely Always she had a mask before her face— Truly the wrist Holding it lightly Fitted the task: Sometimes however Was there a shiver, Fingertip quiver, Ever so slightly— Holding the mask? For years and years and years I wondered But dared not ask And then— I blundered, Looked behind the mask, To find Nothing— She had no face. She had become Merely a hand Holding a mask With grace. —Author unknown

The payoff for Ahimsa isn't that you upgrade the illusion, which is what the ego is always striving to do with more money, possessions, and power. The payoff is that you get to be who you really are.

The self is seen as a psychological fiction, which means that its relationships are essentially fiction.

We're accompanied by an internal play-by-play announcer who is forever proclaiming the way things supposedly are and should be in our game of life. This announcer believes it's being helpful, but it doesn't realize the commentaries are ruining the game. Not only is it covering over the real action, but it's setting us up for disappointment, since the game itself rarely matches what's supposed to be happening.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.

One day, years later, the soldiers wheeled around to find themselves in a city of glass. Their rifles turned to carnival glass; bullets dissolved, glittering, in their hands. From the poet's zoo they heard monkeys cry; from the poet's observatory they heard poem after poem like a call to prayer.

todo es tan garciamarqueciano que sospecho que él no existió...

I had come to appreciate the reality of solitude and the illusion of community that bars provide.

An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.

And people who do hideous things do not look like people who do hideous, things. There is no "face of evil." If we could somehow subtract all its horrifying connotations, the actual face of Saddam I Hussein looks rather avuncular, and has often been recorded as having a big friendly smile. Hitler's face, had it not become an icon of evil because of the atrocities his life engendered, might be considered almost comical, Ch

I don't change. It's not that I change. Reality changes. Everything becomes very small, and I exist entirely inside my mind. Even my own body isn't real." Indicating

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time." —JAMES THURBER

No, I impersonated my client. My imaginary client. That I impersonated." I was caught in a loop for a second there.

In Naked Lunch, the emperors not only have no clothes, they prance through the pages as simians and purple-assed baboons.

Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion.

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Mundus vult decipi. The world winks at dishonesty. The world does not call it dishonesty.

On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire. Not

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire.