“What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”

—  Woody Allen , Without Feathers

"Selections from the Allen Notebooks".
Without Feathers (1975)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet." by Woody Allen?
Woody Allen photo
Woody Allen 229
American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, p… 1935

Related quotes

Firoozeh Dumas photo

“Ever since we had arrived in the United States, my classmates kept asking me about magic carpets.
- They don't exist-I always said. I was wrong. Magic carpets do exist. But they are called library cards.”

Firoozeh Dumas (1965) Iranian-American memoirist

Source: Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad

Van Morrison photo

“Enlightenment says the world is nothing
Nothing but a dream, everything's an illusion
And nothing is real.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Enlightenment
Song lyrics, Enlightenment (1990)

Jonathan Safran Foer photo

“Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated (2002)
Context: "You do not have to present not-truths to me, Sasha. I am not a child."(But I do. That is what you always fail to understand. I present not-truths in order to protect you. That is also why I try so inflexibly to be a funny person. Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.)

“What’s real is what’s valuable. Everything else is just an illusion.”

Karl Schroeder (1962) Author. Technology consultant

Source: Lady of Mazes (2005), Chapter 17 (p. 183).

William James photo

“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James, vol. I, p. 147.
1870s

Libba Bray photo

“That's what living in their world is-a big lie. An illusion where everyone looks the other way and pretends that nothing unpleasant exists at all, no goblins of the dark, no ghosts of the soul.”

Libba Bray (1964) American teen writer

“Sometimes I think that everything I see does not exist. Because everything I see is what I saw, and everything I saw does not exist.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

A veces creo que no existe todo lo que veo. Porque todo lo que veo es todo lo que vi. Y todo lo que vi no existe.
Voces (1943)

Stephen Fry photo

“LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.
1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël photo

“Religion is nothing, if it is not everything; if existence is not filled with it.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) Swiss author

Pt. 4, ch. 1
De l’Allemagne [Germany] (1813)
Original: (fr) La religion n'est rien si elle n'est pas tout, si l'existence n'en est pas remplie.

Alexis Karpouzos photo

“Nothing ever exists entirely alone: everything is in relation to everything else!”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: Cosmology, philosophy and physics

Related topics