“Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.”

“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

“The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

“Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this: you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That's the first feature of consciousness, it's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

“There is the world for you. Beauty, true beauty, is intangible. It is in the eye of the beholder. Something that we can lose at any moment, and the more you examine it, the more illusive it becomes. True happiness is virtue, and virtue is predicated on knowledge and righteous conduct.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

“This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.”

Jack Abbott book In the Belly of the Beast

“The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

“There is an optical illusion about every person we meet.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.”

Susan Blackmore (1951) British writer and academic

“Your personality - the real you inside - was the price of beauty.”

Scott Westerfeld book Uglies