Quotes about Illusion

Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.

Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks.

To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.

Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep.

Snowflake. You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you don't have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back.

There's a lot of things look better at a distance

Beauty makes promises that beauty cant keep. I've seen it too many times. Twice in this house.

On and on we go, for the mental consciousness labours under the illusion that there is somewhere to go to, a goal to consciousness. Whereas of course there is no goal. Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

The optimist builds himself safe inside a cell and paints the inside walls sky-blue and blocks up the door and says he's in heaven.