George MacDonald Quotes

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

I believe in illusion - I don't believe in magic.

I think art is more glorious than life but not more real.

One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality.

It is easier to be mistaken about the true than the beautiful.

To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.

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

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

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.

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

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

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

A reflection of an exact image is the closest thing to you-so that you can see it-but it's far enough away so that you really understand it. There is real life in this movie, but it hovers just an inch above reality.

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

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

Truth is always a delusion.

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

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

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?