Quotes About Illusion

You can't see reality. You never could: You just distort the truth until you end up with a version you can live with.

He just knew we would find luck, but believing something don't make it true.

A biofilm that appears to produce a cloaking effect.

Time is a dream - or a nightmare - from which there is never any waking. We who travel in Time are dreamers who occasionally share a common experience.

The subtlest lie of all is the full truth.

You can walk through the grocery store and, while the brightly colored packaging and empty promises are still mesmerizing, you can see the products for what they are.

Yet when our thinking quietens down, the upset tends to disappear. If we look closely, we can see the idea that another person can make us feel a certain way is as illusory as the 'white triangle' we hallucinate when we look at the image above. And that is why the physicist David Bohm said, 'Thought creates our world and then says, "I didn't do it.

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominate political mythology.

Only in promotional brochures was Los Angeles the City of Angels. To those who knew it, really knew it, it was not a city, but a vast, open grave swallowing up young lives.

You're like the figures you display in your shop. A beautiful thing, shiny in sunlight, but at the core—poured metal, cold stone.

Complexity writings are filled with metaphors that try to make complex phenomena understandable to the human brain's hardwired need for order, meaning, patterns, sense making, and control, ever feeding our illusion that we know what's going on. We often don't. But the pretense that we do is comforting—and sometimes necessary for some effort at action.

The truth is a story. The truth is a habit. The truth is a compromise. The truth is a casualty. The truth died long ago.

Love and hate are not the same emotion turned upside down. One is an illusion of the heart and the other is love betrayed. Apathy lies in between.

t]he Darwinian argues that morality simply does not work (from a biological perspective), unless we believe that it is objective. Darwinian theory shows that, in fact, morality is a function of (subjective) feelings; but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity. (Ruse 1998, 253; emphasis mine)

Everything seeks unity. The goal of many religions and mythic ordeals is to return to a lost state of Divine Oneness. But we have no need to return to a state of oneness because unity is axiomatic and we already are integrated in it. Barely recognizing our situation, here and now we live in a whole and beautifully harmonious wonder world. Only a self-imposed illusion of separateness keeps us from recognizing our own center of awareness and identity with the One.

this is exactly how Satan works, not through what seems grotesque and repulsive, but through what seduces us.

Werewolves and silver bullets!" Shakespeare coughed a quick laugh and shook his head. "Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Our greater capacity for learning is often offset by our greater capacity for magical thinking.

On Being Sane in Insane Places

Photographs and videos are often misperceived and can be easily doctored, and lights in the sky have many prosaic explanations: aerial flares, lighted balloons, experimental aircraft, helicopters, clouds, swamp gas, or even the planet Venus, which, if you are driving on an undulating highway away from city lights, really does appear to be a bright light following your car.

he saw her as she was—a hideous phantom of the corruption of the ages.

Oliphant plays with images of windows and mirrors, translucence and opacity, the present and the past.

Let your actions speak louder than words, however: professionalism matters, while popularity is illusory, fleeting, and short-lived. Your contributions to the field, by enhancing service, creating new models to replace outdated practice, and quietly working to improve communities, matter most.

It almost sounds sensible when you say it," Prince First-Born Splendor said. "Even though I know better.