Illusory Reality Quotes

Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many.

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

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

The beast is the modern world that we live in! The material world. The physical world. The world of illusion that we think is real. We live for it; we're enslaved by it. And it will ultimately be our undoing.

..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.

There is nothing real about film. Nothing. Even the light particles that project the film can't be proven to exist. Nothing is there.

Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.

In a deep metaphysical sense, all that is conditioned is illusory. All phenomena are literally 'appearances,' the outer masks in which the One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more 'material' and solid the appearance, the further is it from reality, and therefore the more illusory it is.

Sometimes, upon waking, the residual dream can be more appealing that reality, and one is reluctant to give it up. For a while, you feel like a ghost -- Not fully materialized, and unable to manipulate your surroundings. Or else, it is the dream that haunts you. You wait with the promise of the next dream.

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament,, and embrace it with passion.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

I can't deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there…the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

I see the state of all of us who live, nothing more than phantoms or a weightless shadow.

And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.