Michel Houellebecq Quotes

Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.

A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.

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

Reality: What a concept!

EXISTENCE, n. A transient, horrible, fantastic dream,/ Wherein is nothing yet all things do seem:/ From which we're wakened by a friendly nudge/ Of our bedfellow Death, and cry: "O fudge!"

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

When I turn the lights out, when I close my eyes, reality overcomes me, I'm living a lie.

How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

Nothing in this world is real

I knew the past wasn't real. It was only an idea, and the thing I'd wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn't name - it just didn't exist. It was only an idea, too.

That which is cannot be true.

Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

I always see that there's a - from a philosophical point of view - there's the appearance of things that everybody wants you to think is happening, then there's the reality underneath it.

Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

The source of all the material comes from nothingness, illusion is working more on things you can prove. That's the principle, the essence of life, it is actually an illusion, not immaterial. That's worth pursuing. So illusion is not nothing. In a way, that is the truth.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.