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Delusions Quotes

Quotes tagged as "delusions" Showing 1-30 of 122
Friedrich Nietzsche
“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

Bertrand Russell
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Arthur Schopenhauer
“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

Shannon L. Alder
“Insanity is everyone expecting you not to fall apart when you find out everything you believed in was a lie.”
Shannon L. Alder

Karen Marie Moning
“Most people are good and occasionally do something they know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn, as long as they don’t get caught. But evil is a completely different creature, Mac. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.”
Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever

Colson Whitehead
“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.”
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

Christopher Hitchens
“I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.”
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you never met, and to take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.”
Doug Stanhope

Alyssa Reyans
“The doctor’s words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live.”
Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother

Tony Kushner
“Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”
Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

John Cheever
“Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.”
John Cheever

William Golding
“We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.”
William Golding, Darkness Visible

Aleksandar Hemon
“Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.”
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

Dexter Palmer
“The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies”
Dexter Palmer, Version Control

Shannon L. Alder
“Delusions are hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding insane people living in a backwards world.”
Shannon L. Alder

“No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities..”
Christian Nestell Bovee

Yuval Noah Harari
“As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. The other-worldly meanings medieval people found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist and capitalist meanings modern people find. The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building a new cathedral.
So perhaps happiness is synchronising one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.
This is quite a depressing conclusion. Does happiness really depend on self-delusion?”
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Patricia Highsmith
“Thinking no more about it, he stepped off into that cool space, that fast descent to her, with nothing in his mind but a memory of a curve of her shoulder, naked, as he had never seen it.”
Patricia Highsmith, This Sweet Sickness

A.E. Housman
“The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.”
A. E. Housman

Fernando Pessoa
“Government of the world begins in us. It's not the sincere who govern the world, but neither is it the insincere; it's those who create in themselves a real sincerity by artificial and automatic means. This sincerity is what makes them strong, and it outshines the less false sincerity of others. To be adept at deluding oneself is the first prerequisite for a statesman. Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.”
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Jeanette Winterson
“If you had never lived, and my mind was full of you--a fantasy figure with whom I am having an intense personal relationship--they'd give me treatment. They'd lock me up for being delusional. As it is, yes, it's an embarrassment.

The black-armband days were easier. It was a sign to say--I am a bit odd. Give me space. Give me time. Grief takes time.

I am grieving. I discover that grieving means living with someone who is no longer there.”
Jeanette Winterson, Night Side of the River

Henri Nouwen
“Our addictions make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment: accumulation of wealth and power; attainment of status and admiration; lavish consumption of food and drink, and sexual gratification without distinguishing between lust and love. These addictions create expectations that cannot but fail to satisfy our deepest needs. As long as we live within the world's delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests in 'the distant country,' leaving us to face an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled.”
Henri Nouwen

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“We should deal with children as God deals with us, we are happiest under the influence of innocent delusions.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

Ryan Gelpke
“The United Kingdom is like a schizophrenic patient with delusions of grandeur.”
Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

Neil Hilborn
“When I was little I broke both my ankles jumping off a roof because I was sure a cape would enable me to fly.
My parents attributed this to my strong imagination.
Last year my therapist called it a delusion.
I fail to see the difference.”
Neil Hilborn, The Future

Cynthia Ozick
“The oasis is always over the next hill. And the next hill is always more of the same desert.”
Cynthia Ozick, Antiquities

Fernando Pessoa
“Let us stop being deluded about life and its ways. Let us flee, my love, from being ourselves... Let us never remove from our finger the magic ring that summons, when turned, the fairies of silence and the elves of darkness and the gnomes of oblivion...”
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Dean Koontz
“When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples”
Dean Koontz, The House at the End of the World

Giannina Braschi
“An orgy is a communal disintegration of the senses that become delusional.”
Giannina Braschi, Putinoika

“ഏറ്റവു� പ്രിയപ്പെട്ട ചി� വികല്പങ്ങൾ ആരും വിട്ടു കളയാ� തയ്യാറാവുന്നില്ല. അത� വ്യക്ത� ആയാലും സമൂഹമായാലു�."
ഹാമ്മർ സിജി റോയി”
CJ Roy

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