T. S. Eliot Quotes

The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly irridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.

The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

No, none of us seem so very real. We're only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make-believe.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration.

There are so many things that can take over your life: money, alcohol, drugs - even fashion. People hand you things, and you start to believe life is easy. And it's not like that - you're not supposed to be the person you play in the movies.

If you search for truthfulness, you might as well be blind.

People assume that I'm very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I've only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I'm happy to go along with it.

If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?

Of course you have to create the conditions of a certain belief. And maybe ignoring something that you don't want to see, at least for the time of the shooting.

What people believe prevails over the truth.

We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?

Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.

It is human to err, but it is devilish to remain willfully in error.

We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

People had figured out all sorts of ways to make things seem different than they truly were.

The thing is too that when you sell people a false reality and they take that to be the norm, when that false reality is light-years from what’s really happening, that in itself is a tremendous defense mechanism because when you start talking about what is actually happening, it is so different from what people perceive to be happening. They just can’t make that jump; it’s too insane for them.

You see, there's the way things seemed and then there's the way things were and one is so often the total reverse of the other.