Mental Illusions Quotes

The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies.

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

When I graduated from college, I thought I was losing my hair. And I started looking into hair transplants. I was talking to my mom. My mom said, 'You're crazy. You have so much hair.' It was a real lesson in your mind playing tricks on you. You can make your mind think anything is happening.

Our mind is like a cloudy sky: in essence clear and pure, but overcast by clouds of delusions. Just as the thickest clouds can disperse, so, too, even the heaviest delusions can be removed from our mind.

For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

In vain do we seek tranquility in the desert; temptations are always with us; our passions, represented by the demons, never let us alone: those monsters created by the heart, those illusions produced by the mind, those vain specters that are our errors and our lies always appear before us to seduce us; they attack us even in our fasting or our mortifications, in other words, in our very strength.

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control.

You can never beat your own mind when it plays tricks on you.

I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams... Man... is above all the plaything of his memory.

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

I had build up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.

The world in general has meaning, deep meaning at times. This cannot be dismissed as a delusion, an artifact of chemicals.

There is an interesting scientific dispute about realism and optimism. Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.

We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't know and didn't believe.

I'm not good with sci-fi stuff. I'll be in it, as long as I can see what I'm dealing with and know it's fake. As soon as I watch it on TV, though, my brain registers it as 'Everything's real!'

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.

Your doubts are generated by fear, and fear is a series of distorted thoughts.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. Admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies. Unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there.

We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.

Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn't exist.

I'm not completely sure we aren't all living in a hallucination now.