Quotes about illusions

A lifelong habit of being right also had the effect of diminishing one’s social appeal, especially among those who prefer to keep the bubble of their various illusions a safe distance from a needle-sharp and probing intelligence.

“We all use the world, and are used by it,” he said, after a moment. “Some of us are more aware than others of using and being used. It is our fortune to have fewer illusions.”

We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.

When you die, the first thing you lose is your life. The next thing is your illusions. (p. 58)

“Secret services and their customers are like anyone else, I'm afraid. They value most what costs most, and Merlin costs a fortune. Ever bought a fake picture?”

“I sold a couple once,” said Toby with a flashy, nervous smile, but no one laughed.

“The more you pay for it, the less inclined you are to doubt it.”

"Sometimes it's a mighty struggle to know what's real and what's just . . . a mirage. You understand?"

"Yeah," I said.

Another man, an American, had once told her in a high, laughing moment his theory of love. It was magic, he said. "The magic ain't real, darlin, but when it's gone it's over."

Georgie didn't want to believe in such thin stuff, that all devotion was fuelled by delusion, that you needed some spurious myth to keep you going in love or work or service. Yet she'd felt romance evaporate often enough to make her wonder.

"The years that are gone seem like dreams -if one might go on sleeping and dreaming- but to wake up and find -oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all ones life."

In his view, the true deep human fantasy was the conviction of safety. Men believed their women were devoted; wives felt that their men were dependable. Both ignored contrary evidence.

It appears that we all labour under delusions.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.

"The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They’re either vicious or tragic."