As some people turned to religion for comfort, so, High smith wrote in her notebook in September 1970, she took refuge in her belief that she was making progress as a writer. But she realized that both systems of survival were, however, fundamentally illusory. She wrote, she said, quoting Oscar Wilde because, 'Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality'.

— Andrew Wilson

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

— Brian Greene

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.

— Steven Millhauser

Mona (illusory vision) means new things keep arising, and one indeed sees new things; and he remains engrossed in them.

— Dada Bhagwan

The life of this world is but a sport and a pastime.

— Anonymous

What a strange thing it is to wake up to a milk-white overcast June morning! The sun is hidden by a thick cotton blanket of clouds, and the air is vapor-filled and hazy with a concentration of blooming scent. The world is somnolent and cool, in a temporary reprieve from the normal heat and radiance. But the sensation of illusion is strong. Because the sun can break through the clouds at any moment. . . What a soft thoughtful time. In this illusory gloom, like a night-blooming flower, let your imagination bloom in a riot of color.

— Vera Nazarian