David Mitchell Quotes

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.

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.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

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

We don't attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

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

When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was.

If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality.

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better.

The only people who become disillusioned are people who have illusions.

If you keep saying two plus two equals five over and over again, then that is what people are going to think. Maybe it does equal five if we keep changing the definition of what's normal and what's right and what's wrong.

It's very difficult to distinguish between what a person believes and what they say they believe.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

The trouble with illusions is that you aren't aware you have any until they are taken away from you.

People like what is not true and they don't like what is true.

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

There is a flaw with words, they always force us to feel enlightened, but when we turn around to face the world they always fail us and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment

False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn't so.

Illusions only control you when you think they are real.