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People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
Even the loveliest dream bears like a blemish its difference from reality, the awareness that what it grants is mere illusion.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO, Minima Moralia
People are distracted by objects of desire, and afterwards repent of the lust they've indulged, because they have indulged with a phantom and are left even farther from Reality than before. Your desire for the illusory is a wing, by means of which a seeker might ascend to Reality. When you have indulged a lust, your wing drops off; you become lame and that fantasy flees. Preserve the wing and don't indulge such lust, so that the wing of desire may bear you to Paradise. People fancy they are enjoying themselves, but they are really tearing out their wings for the sake of an illusion.
JALALUDDIN RUMI, quoted in The Pocket Rumi Reader
Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.
ELBERT HUBBARD, The American Bible
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
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