Reality Is An Illusion Quotes & Sayings

Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow. — Luigi Pirandello

How does the biological wetware of the brain give rise to our experience: the sight of emerald green, the taste of cinnamon, the smell of wet soil? What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it really is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. Over millions of years of evolution the human brain has become adept at turning this energy and matter into a rich sensory experience of being in the world. — David Eagleman

Juggling is an illusion ... In reality, the balls are being independently caught and thrown in rapid succession ... It is actually task switching. — Gary Keller

At the heart of all temptations, as we see here, is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion - that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms. Moral — Pope Benedict XVI

One of my principal concerns is the contradiction between appearance and reality - illusion and reality. I try to set up an expectation of sorts and then contradict it. — Stuart Pearson Wright

Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality. — Herman Wouk

There is no objective reality. But there is only an illusion of consciousness, there is only an objectivication of reality, which was created by the spirit. The origin of life is creativity, freedom; and the personality, subject, and spirit are the representatives of that origin, but not the nature, not the object. — Nikolai Berdyaev

Reality has a way of bursting the bubble of illusion, and an affair is one of the biggest illusions that anyone can experience in life. It's based almost entirely on emotions with almost no logic to support it.

That fact becomes clear when children, employers, clergy, family, and friends all hear about the affair. Because they are not in the fog, they see the affair for what it really is: the cruelest, most devastating, and selfish act anyone can ever inflict on a spouse. With so many people seeing the situation logically and not emotionally, the unfaithful spouse has an opportunity to be advised and influenced by these people. Furthermore, the betrayed spouse gains support when he or she needs it the most. — Willard F. Harley Jr.

We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion. — Sigmund Freud

Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality - namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men. — Loren Eiseley

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. — Edward Sapir

Based upon quantum mechanics, our physical reality should not be solid. Most likely our physical reality is an elaborate illusion within our own consciousness and the collective consciousness of the Universe/God. — Russell Anthony Gibbs

Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate 'other.' You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is. By 'forget,' I mean that you can no longer feel this oneness as self-evident reality. — Eckhart Tolle

While we only look at Nature it is fair to say that Autumn is the end of the year; but it is still more true that Autumn is the beginning of the year ... Autumn is the time when in fact the leaves bud. Leaves wither because winter begins; but they also wither because spring is already beginning, because new buds are being made, as tiny as percussion caps out of which the spring will crack ... It is only an optical illusion that my flowers die in autumn; for in reality they are born. — Karel Capek

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content. — Robert E. Howard

Nowledge which ... transcends the bounds, the prejudices and prejudgements of any one society and culture is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a glorious and luminous reality. Just how it was achieved remains subject to debate. — Ernest Gellner

We live in a world with an ever-growing population. Personal space these days is at a premium. Physically, we are practically tripping over our fellow man. Mentally and spiritually, the divide among us seems to widen. — Carlos Wallace

The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I ... " seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. — Milan Kundera

To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance. — Eric Hoffer

There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion." The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led. — Eric Hoffer

And believing that we are broken is the same as being broken. It means we experience ourselves that way. That perception shapes our reality. It is an illusion we must strive to avoid, as great misery comes from such a belief. — Jewel

And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.And - I would argue as well - all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying — Donna Tartt

To successfully create illusion, the first thing you need is trust, but to perfect an illusion, the false reality most appear as authentic as the one it hides. Careful attention must be paid to every detail. The slightest of imperfections can, like a pin to a balloon, burst the illusion . . . and the truth behind the illusion becomes revealed. — Emily Thorne

I have a clear understanding of things, and no stress. A child brings regrets, not clarity. It can open up your eyes to an illusion, not a reality. But nonetheless, the gift of life is a beautiful thing; cherish it, love it, and lavish it. A birth of a child may not bring clarity, but it brings infinite love, new hope, and turns its parent(s) to a new light. — Lionel Suggs

I really like the topic about time is an Illusion and also this quote "#Time Physical things are merely the collapse of psychic things into physical reality." - it's powerful. As much you repeat it as much powerful it gets. — Deyth Banger

Life is an illusion of the reality which we want or wish — Saurabh Mathur

the more you know about time, the more you'll appreciate that in reality it's nothing like we think it is. Time as we generally accept it is an immersive illusion that has very little to do with what it really is or how it behaves. The time we think we know doesn't exist (as you saw in the capsule experiment). Nothing about the way we individually experience time is absolute. — Mo Gawdat

As you look for solutions, seek for wholeness. The bridge to wholeness is an increasingly broader perspective and an increasingly greater inclusion of life. The world of structure would have you believe that reality is that which is permanent and illusion is that which is changeable. It would have you believe that when a thing is changeable, it is just illusion. If it is permanent, then it is real. Anything is real that is composed of love, spirit, and adamantine particles. These three aspects of reality can be shaped and reshaped in infinite ways or perceived from infinite directions without diminishing their reality. Life is a veritable river of fluid possibilities. — Glenda Green

Being a parent is a monumental thing. You shape reality for another person. You cannot be an illusion. You cannot be paralyzed by the fear that you are an illusion. If you have done a bad job, or no job at all, what remains of you is proof that the world is an unfeeling place. If you have done a good job, what remains is the part of you that was magical. — Steven Galloway

Even though our physical reality is more like an illusion, it is still the "illusion" that helps us evolve, so we should take it seriously. Giving up in life or committing suicide because we found out that our reality works like an illusion is not going to help us evolve back to Creation. Committing suicide is one of the worst things you can do because it can cause your soul to become stuck on Earth with little awareness of what is happening. You can be stuck in an illusionary reality that seems to keep replaying itself for centuries. Some of us like to refer to these lost souls as ghosts. Being in this lost state of awareness will not free you from pain and suffering, but will stunt your spiritual evolution which is one of the worst things you can do to your soul. DNA creates our external reality because — Pao Chang

Nostalgia is an illness
for those who haven't realized
that today
is tomorrow's nostalgia. — Zeena Schreck

It may be that we exist and cease to exist in alternations, like the minute dots in some forms of toned printing or the succession of pictures on a cinema film. It may be that reality is an illusion of movement in an eternal, static, multidimensional universe. We may be only a story written on the ground of the inconceivable; the pattern on a rug beneath the feet of the incomprehensible. — H.G.Wells

The process of concentrating on the goal
every day greatly increases the likelihood of noticing an
opportunity in the environment. The coincidence will create
the illusion that writing down the goal causes the environment
to produce opportunities. But in reality the only thing
that changes is the person's ability to notice the opportunities. — Scott Adams

Control is merely an illusion we construct to cope with the chaos that is reality. — Fred Bubbers

Because an illusion is an illusion. Reality always exists despite the facade. — Kasie West

Ugliness is an illusion, gentlemen. Like beauty. Like color. All depends on the light. The only reality is action. — Karen Traviss

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world. — Steven Pinker

In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. The illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space an time, but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness. — Eckhart Tolle

There is no death! Death is very much like sunset. It is only an appearance. For, when the sun sets here, it rises elsewhere. In reality, the sun never sets. Likewise, death is only an illusion, an appearance. For, what is death here is birth elsewhere. For life is endless. — Dada Vaswani

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams. — Salvador Dali

I can't kill him and he can't keep me alive. The world we've lived in together is an illusion that can't be maintained. The edges are fraying, curling away to reveal the harsh reality beneath. The lion and the lamb do not lie down together. It just can't be. — Kitty Thomas

On foundations we believe in the reality of mathematics, but of course, when philosophers attack us with their paradoxes, we rush to hide behind formalism and say 'mathematics is just a combination of meaningless symbols,' ... Finally we are left in peace to go back to our mathematics and do it as we have always done, with the feeling each mathematician has that he is working with something real. The sensation is probably an illusion, but it is very convenient. — Jean Dieudonne

Life is an illusion because we still don't know what reality is. — Debasish Mridha

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater. — Flannery O'Connor

Reality is an illusion that occurs due to the lack of alcohol. — W.C. Fields

A figure appears between me and the oncoming Inquisitor, moving with deadly grace. It's a boy, I think. Who is this? This boy is not an illusion - I can sense his reality, the solidity of his figure that the black sky and the locusts don't have. He is clad in a whirlwind of hooded blue robes, and a metallic silver mask covers his entire face. He crouches in front of me, every line of his body tense, his focus entirely on the Inquisitor. A long dagger gleams in each of his gloved hands. — Marie Lu

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth. — Mary Antin

There is no single thing ... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become ... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition ... — Roger Cardinal

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world. — Arnold Newman

Everything is just electricity and magnetism; everything is only an illusion. The reality is in the spiritual plane. — Lobsang Rampa

Ruling Akaran is a strange task. In many ways, it is like balancing an illusion. You must separate the illusion of what you see and the reality of its consequences," he said. "Tell me, my queen, are you ready to play with fate? — Roshani Chokshi

Tom hunts alone. While shunned by all he sees, he grows aware that, in reality, life is lived alone. When with a hen, there's only an illusion of sharing; a pretence that life's trials are easier to endure. Even sleep is a barrier that can't be shared. — Peter Gray

If you don't believe in time, your day will be longer (because reality time is an illusion, it exist only because of us and if we don't exist time doesn't exist!?) — Deyth Banger

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion. — Max Jacob

And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined. That is not to say they don't exist for us as human beings. They do. But our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn't die, but merely goes underground. — Marianne Williamson

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. — Alan W. Watts

Reality is an illusion created by a lack of alcohol. — N. F. Simpson

The world is an illusion. Those who choose to come to it are seeking for a place where they can be illusions, and avoid their own reality." W-155.2:1-2 — MiraclesOne Foundation

The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates - a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it. — Miguel Angel Ruiz

The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites. — Gaston Bachelard

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality. — Jean Cocteau

What if I told you that the world around you, with its rich colors, textures, sounds, and scents is an illusion, a show put on for you by your brain? If you could perceive reality as it is, you would be shocked by its colorless, odorless, tasteless silence. Outside your brain, there is just energy and matter. — David Eagleman

When someone tells you, "I love you," and then you feel, "Oh, I must be worthy after all," that's an illusion. That's not true. Or someone says, "I hate you," and you think, "Oh, God, I knew it; I'm not very worthy," that's not true either. Neither one of these thoughts hold any intrinsic reality. They are an overlay. When someone says, "I love you," he is telling you about himself, not you. When someone says, "I hate you," she is telling you about herself, not you. World views are self views - literally — Adyashanti

It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by a functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished - and in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. — Michel Foucault

To persuade thinking persons in Eastern Europe that Central American Marxists - the Sandinistas, the guerillas in El Salvador - are in absurd and tragic error is not difficult. Poles and Czechs and Hungarians can hardly believe, after what they experienced under socialism, that other human beings would fall for the same bundle of lies, half-truths, and distortions. Sadly, however, illusion is often sweeter to human taste than reality. The last marxist in the world will probably be an American nun. — Michael Novak

Someone who begins to develop an interest in the teachings can tend to distance themselves from the reality of material things, as if the teachings were something completely apart from daily life. Often, at the bottom of all this, there is an attitude of giving up and running away from one's own problems, with the illusion that one will be able to find something that will miraculously help one to transcend all that. But the teachings are based on the principle of our actual human condition. We have a physical body with all its various limits: each day we have to eat, work, rest, and so on. This is our reality, and we can't ignore it. — Namkhai Norbu

We must remember that we do not observe nature as it actually exists, but nature exposed to our methods of perception. The theories determine what we can or cannot observe ... Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one. — Albert Einstein

As an actor, the only thing we can do is play the truth at that moment. Because at any point in time if you play the future, or you play that you know something that the audience does not know, it kills the illusion of reality. — Anthony Mackie

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight - the light of our particular day. — Loren Eiseley

People reject what they do not understand because it makes them feel small. They would rather believe in some other reality, even if it is only an illusion, so long as it makes them feel bigger. — Suzy Kassem

Oneness with God is not a dream, it is the only reality. Everything else is an illusion. — E'yen A. Gardner

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion — Donna J. Haraway

What you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp. — Ayn Rand

In my Future of an Illusion I was concerned [ ... ] with what the ordinary man understands by his religion, that system of doctrines and pledges that on the one hand explains the riddle of this world to him with an enviable completeness, and on the other assures him that a solicitous Providence is watching over him and will make up to him in a future existence for any shortcomings in this life. The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other from but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud

Hope refuses to believe that the inevitable is so. What has always been and can't change is an illusion; if anything is true, it is that change is inevitable, not that the inevitable will not change. But evil caustically replies, Nonsense. It is what it is. You will only be more discouraged and frustrated until you accept reality. — Dan B. Allender

The old masters said if you met another Buddha on the road, you should kill him. All reality is an illusion: if you think you've found the incarnation of enlightenment, destroy that illusion on the spot. But the real world is real. Therefore, if you meet a bandit on the road, you should kill him. Anyone who seeks to make a bad world worse is a monster and an alien. — Edward W. Robertson

is satisfying, not frightening, not empty. It is an illusion of reality created by ignorance that is so unbearable. The illusion of separateness, the illusion of connectedness to disconnected hardened hearts and closed minds is the source of the suffering that we would all wish to be free of. — Mitch Halper

Many Sages have said, "Your world is a dream. You're living in an illusion." They're referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality. When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. — Adyashanti

Human life is designed as a self-study program.
Existence is always one undivided. It is what we often call the Light. It is a pure consciousness of unconditional love. Out of the Light the idea of darkness is created. There is no existence of light and darkness, as separated energies. The separation is illusionary.
Experiencing ourselves as humans is an exploration of the greater Self in a localised condition.
A dense reality is created to facilitate the idea of forgetfulness.
Now we collectively entered a new time of remembering. It is not necessary anymore to create the illusion of self-disconnection from the energy source. — Raphael Zernoff

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality. — Ruth Bernhard

Most people's reality is an illusion, a great big illusion. You automatically have to succumb to the illusion that 'I am this body'. I am not George. I am not really George. I am this living thing that goes on, always has been, always will be, but at
this time I happen to be in 'this' body. The body has changed; was a baby, was a young man, will
soon be an old man, and I'll be dead. The
physical body will pass but this bit in the middle,
that's the only reality. All the rest is the illusion,
so to say that somebody thinks we are, the ex-
Beatles are removed from reality in their personal concept. It does not have any truth to it just because somebody thinks it. They are the concepts which become layer upon layer of illusion. Why live in the darkness all your life? Why, if you are unhappy, if you are having a miserable time, why not just look at it. Why are you in the darkness? Look for the light. The light is within. That is the big message — George Harrison

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. — Albert Einstein

The deepest human intuition is not the immediate grasping of the classical-physics-type character of the external world. It is rather that one's own conscious subjective efforts can influence the experiences that follow. Any conception of nature that makes this deep intuition an illusion is counterintuitive. Any conception of reality that cannot explain how our conscious efforts influence our bodily actions is problematic. What is actually deeply intuitive is the continually reconfirmed fact that our conscious efforts can influence certain kinds of experiential feedback. A putatively rational scientific theory needs at the very least to explain this connection in a rational way to be in line with intuition. — Paul Davies

All is illusion, although as long as there's an illusion that the kids need to be fed, all might as well be reality. — Robert Breault

You say that I am living in illusion. But poverty, work, war, they are not illusions. Are they? In what sense am I being deluded? What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can't say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion, only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say. If you say that — U.G. Krishnamurti

If you know something is an illusion, why pretend it is reality? — Lionel Suggs

What is illusion? By what criterion do we judge something to be an illusion? Does there exist for the psyche anything which we may call "illusion"? What we are pleased to call such may be for the psyche a most important factor of life - something as indispensable as oxygen for the organism - a psychic actuality of prime importance. Presumably the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality, and it would therefore be the better part of wisdom for us to say: everything that acts is actual. — C. G. Jung

For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people - a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance. - William Longgood, The Queen Must Die — Susan Wiggs

In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings chained for the duration of their lives in an underground cave, knowing nothing but darkness. Their gaze is confined to the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world are thrown. They believe these flickering shadows are reality. If, Plato writes, one of these prisoners is freed and brought into the sunlight, he sill suffer great pain. Blinded by the glare, he is unable to seeing anything and longs for the familiar darkness. But eventually his eyes adjust to the light. The illusion of the tiny shadows is obliterated. He confronts the immensity, chaos, and confusion of reality. The world is no longer drawn in simple silhouettes. But he is despised when he returns to the cave. He is unable to see in the dark as he used to. Those who never left the cave ridicule him and swear never to go into the light lest they be blinded as well. — Chris Hedges

Belief is a meaningless word. What does it mean? I believe something. Okay, now you have someone who is hearing voices and believes in these voices. It doesn't mean they have any necessary reality. Your whole concept of your "I" is an illusion. You have to give something called an "I" before you speak of what the "I" believes. — William S. Burroughs

Nothing in oratory is more important than to win for the orator the favour of his hearer, and to have the latter so affected as to be swayed by something resembling an impulse of the spirit impetu quodam animi or emotion perturbatione, rather than by judgment or deliberation. For men decide far more problems by hate, or love, or lust, or rage, or sorrow, or joy, or hope, or fear, or illusion, or some other inward emotion aliqua permotione mentis, than by reality or authority, or any legal standard, or judicial precedent or statute. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter. — Edgar Mitchell

Here, in this book, I will try to show that the guru is actually like the horizon. A horizon is apparent - a line where earth and sky appear to meet. But in reality, they never meet. There is only an illusion of an ending point, a point of reference where we can stand and measure and assess. In this way, the guru is like a horizon between wisdom and method, myth and truth, science and faith. D — Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity — Thornton Wilder

In endeavor itself there is a certain dynamic entertainment, affording an illusion of useful purpose. With achievement the illusion is dispelled. Man's greatest accomplishment is to produce change. The only good in life is study, because study is an endeavor that never reaches fulfillment. It busies a man to the end of his days, and it aims at the only true reality in all this world of shams and deceits. — Rafael Sabatini

He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. — W. Somerset Maugham

Time is a sphere made up of language, colours, smells, senses and sounds, a sphere in which you and the world coexist, an instrument with which to put the world in order and comprehend it, one of the reasons for your survival.
But if time grows too tight, then it becomes a reason for doing away with yourself.
Time is not an illusion. Nor is it the only reality. It is one possible, widespread form for encounters between the mind and the surrounding world. But not the only possible one. If you are driven by curiosity, or if you are ill and cannot survive any other way, then you can enter the laboratory and touch time. And then it will change. — Peter Hoeg

In this world, perfection is an illusion. Reagrdless of all those who utter the contrary, this is the reality. Obviously mediocre fools will forever lust for perfection and seek it out. However, what meaning is there in perfection? None. Not a bit ... After perfection there exists nothing higher. Not even room for creation which means there is no room for wisdom or talent either. Understand? To scientists like ourselves, perfection is despair. - Kurotsuchi Mayuri (Bleach 306) — Tite Kubo

Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach us if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow, — Luigi Pirandello