Guy Debord Quotes

What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunlight.

In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

Success has always been a great liar.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

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

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

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.

Image is what people perceive my life to be. It's nothing like the truth.

Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

The world is cynical and sarcastic, but that doesn't mean that that's always the truth.

Look! Don't be deceived by appearances - men and things are not what they seem. All who are not on the rock are in the sea!

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

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

I can tell you all kinds of moral tales, but fashion and reality are vaguely different.

You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance …

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

It is faith that moves mountains, because it gives the illusion that mountains move …. Illusion is perhaps the only reality in life.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Everything you see is not always real.