Quotes about illusion

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

— Woody Allen

The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. But the man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against the present's afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of hastily experienced stages. What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon.

— Emile Durkheim

We could hardly believe that after so many ordeals, after all the trials of modern skepticism, there was still so much left in our souls to destroy.

— Alexander Herzen

Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not.

— E. R. Beadle

What seems to be, is, to those to whom it seems to be, and is productive of the most dreadful consequences to those to whom it seems to be, even of torments, despair, eternal death.

— William Blake

A pleasant illusion is better than a harsh reality.

— Christian Nevell Bovee

Pray look better, Sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

— Miguel De Cervantes

Pleasure can be supported by an illusion; but happiness rests upon truth.

— Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

We must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

— Cyril Connolly

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

— Joseph Conrad

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities --a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces --a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

— George Eliot

What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?

— Desiderius Erasmus

The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.

— Sigmund Freud

Oh, how powerfully the magnet of illusion attracts.

— Gutzkow

People who have realized that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations.

— Alexander Herzen

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.

— Eugene Ionesco

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

— John Keats

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

— Arthur Koestler

Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Better a dish of illusion and a hearty appetite for life, than a feast of reality and indigestion therewith.

— Harry A. Overstreet

We always think every other man's job is easier than our own. The better he does it, the easier it looks.

— Eden Phillpotts

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

— Yasutani Roshi

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

— Bertrand Russell

Disillusion is a natural stage that follows the holding of an illusion.

— Susan Shaughnessy

It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

— Mark Twain

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.

— Oscar Wilde

Where do we people go if not towards the perfection of our own illusion?

— Sorin Cerin

To believe in what you don’t know is as true as to believe in what you do know as long as life is an illusion.

— Sorin Cerin

Just the inexplicable wants to be understood within the nonsense of emptiness that belongs to this world of illusion.

— Sorin Cerin

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.

— Arthur Rimbaud

Ample figure, dazzling splendour to rest under the bed of soil; blooming dreams and withering numb; pangs of hunger, hitches of joy; dreadful pain, loudest laughter, piteous silence that echoes deep – were they all mere delusion? Yet, I wonder if they were real at least until I close these eyes! O dear! Did your own self deceive you?

— Preeth Nambiar