Best 280 quotes in «delusion quotes» category

The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion—but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led.

The grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence. Many politicians promise green, green grass by blending niceties with delusion and by using alluring confidence tricks. They voice attractive tales and tell things, people like to hear. But the post-factual grassland often appears to be parched and barren. ("The grass was greener over there")

The greater the gap between self perception and reality, the more aggression is unleashed on those who point out the discrepancy.

The kind of love I seek is a folie a deux.

The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal's champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the New Left Review. However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of 'sexual McCarthyism', an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it.

The long-deluded will at last see the truth, and thus their expressions will have seen a ghost.

The mirror ever lies.

The neanderthals were scared of death. Out of there desperate quest for immortality they created God, Jesus and delusional eternity to shield themselves from reality that seemed cruel to them. There is no God.

The nature of conspiracy, which among those who both feared and named it, seemed to always possess at its core a misguided belief in the competence of others, as weighed against the incapacities, real or imagined, of the believer. Therefore, he concluded, the belief in conspiracy was an announcement of the believer's own sense of utter helplessness in the face of forces both mysterious and fatally efficient.

[Theology is a] web of contradictions and delusions.

The notion of loving oneself has gotten an undeservedly bad rap, which goes something like this: self-love is narcissistic, selfish, self-indulgent, the supreme delusion of a runaway ego looking out for “number one.” In fact, just the opposite is true.

The possibility of truth has become a delusion to those who made their own disguise the truth.

The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn't appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya's death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive. She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over. A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.

The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.

The only thing that makes life unfair is the delusion that it should be fair.

There are only two profound ways to reach enlightenment: Laugh by yourself, or get tickled.

Today's truth will be tomorrow's lie and you will be left questioning your own sanity.

There are stages in the business of serious life in which to assume is cruel, but to deceive is to destroy; and it is of little consequence, in the conclusion, whether men deceive themselves, or submit, by a kind of mutual consent, to the impositions of each other.

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.

The times might be unpleasant, repulsive. The ghastly chaos, the abhorrent uncivility might be intolerable, might force us into argument or leave us panic-stricken. On such occasions people build within themselves a conviction, that the world outside is diabolical. The whimsical insults test our level of endurance causing us to plead for mercy, wanting us to be pitied than exploited and victimized. Often this grief and shame form a delusion within us that there no longer exists good in this world, that good people are fictitious and that goodness has lost its definition altogether. But such is not true because there are still people who are virtuous, unselfish, willing to help and possessing the ability of restoring our faith in humanity, to disregard them, their presence would be as heinous as the deeds of the people who are unlike them. The times might be unpleasant, repulsive but we’ll come out it, unharmed and liberated.

The worldly life (sansar) is the thing created through delusion [wrong belief]. Therefore when you come to know about this wrong belief, it will go away.

They (Medievalists) are soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed.

To commit the act of felo-de-se is a form of delusion. You see, my love, to leave one's life unfinished implies the possibility of success. What is left unlived may contain the potential truth one always seeks. Those who kill themselves do so with the conviction that they would have reached that truth eventually had they lived to the proper end. They die in the illusion of hope which in a way keeps the rest of us alive. Reason, therefore, for not committing suicide.

To doubt the existence of God is the greatest delusion.

To deny the reality is to be exposed to strong delusion.

There is no excuse to not starting because we can always start small or start tiny or start micro tiny. Don't chase that delusionary perfection, it has already crippled and wasted many lives.

There was a time he’d heard tales of Dab Sweet and he’d stuck thumbs in his belt and chin to the sky and tricked himself that was how his life had been. But the years scraped by hard as ever and he got less and the stories more ’til they were tales of a man he’d never met succeeding at what he’d never have dreamed of attempting.

There will be a solidity to their faith which is very dangerous to our designs and difficult to dissolve. There is a luminosity to it. Just one Christian of that type can dispel years worth of diabolical delusion.

The seething rage that accompanies the truly despondent, effaces the delusional that mock from the safety of their shared illusion.

The victim mindset produces a delusion of fault and blame that blinds you from the simple truth of cause and effect.

They retained only the faintest recollection of what they had lost and had no desire to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They derided the mere possibility of this former felicity of theirs and termed it a day-dream. They could not even picture it to themselves in images and forms, but strange and wondrous to relate, having lost any credence in their former happiness, calling it a fairy tale, they so longed to be innocent and happy once more, all over again that, childlike, they fell down before this, their heart's desire, deified it, built temples, and began to worship their own idea, their own 'desire', and tearfully bowed before it in adoration, while at the same time utterly discounting its feasibility or the possibility of its realization. However, had it ever become possible for them to return to the state of happy innocence they had lost, and if someone could have shown it to them again and asked if they wanted to return to it, they would certainly have refused.

Truth about tears is that , most tears are the result of a delusion

Wahrheit ist ein Wort des Glaubens. Niemand vermag grausamer zu sein, als jene, die im Namen der Wahrheit handeln. Sie handeln auch im Namen der Gerechtigkeit.

Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking? Which is why I am so afraid to speak to Dr. Grene, lest I give him only imaginings. Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.

Vanity remains a feeble weapon The delusional wearer of it considers herself strong

Wait!" said Erbrechen, suddenly feeling jovial. "I change my mind. Never shite again. Ever. Anywhere." It was a small thing, but of such small things were life's joys truly made. The thought, he knew, would keep him smiling for days. "The world is a comedy, intoned Erbrechen, tittering, "and each must play his fart.

We are nothing without them, our scars and our blemishes. Take away our delusional smiles if you must, snatch away our illusory happiness if you must, but please leave us our flaws for we do not wish to exist without them.

We believe we have dived down to the most unfathomable depths, and when we reappear on the surface, the drop of water that glistens on our trembling finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We believe we have discovered a grotto that is stored with bewildering treasure; we come back to the light of day, and the gems we have brought are false – mere pieces of glass – and yet does the treasure shine on, unceasingly, in the darkness!

We're so used to events being portrayed in particular ways that when they actually happen to us, and our life bears no resemblance to expectation, we don't really know how we're supposed to respond. Our lives are unrecognizable to us. Should we still try to be happy, when everything seems so flawed and out of kilter and grey? How are we supposed to be content, when everything on television is so much better?

Wondering and writing constitute positive madness.

We want our delusions and will violently defend these when confronted. We want to believe that the job that is slowly choking us is good, because the effort it would take to change is too terrifying to contemplate. We never want to hear how badly we are being treated in a relationship because we are strong and how dare you suggest we don't know better.

We were never under any delusions as to which was more important, an individual or humanity.

What is the essential difference between banknotes, coins, and chicken shit? None.

When enough insane people scream in harmony that they really are healthy, they can actually start to believe themselves. Or put even more simply: people with overlapping delusions get along wonderfully.

Whoever doubt is in state of delusion.

Whoever is to be wise despises himself. Only the ignorant trust their own judgement.

Women, porn assets, whether they know it or not, are objects They are whores. These whores deserve to be dominated and abused. And once men have had their way with them, these whores are to be discarded. Porn glorifies the cruelty and domination of sexual exploitation in the same way popular culture, as Jensen points out, glorifies the domination and cruelty of war. It is the same disease. It is the belief that “because I have the ability to use force and control to make others do as I please, I have the right to use this force and control.” It is the disease of corporate and imperial power. It extinguishes the sacred and the human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It replaces empathy, eros, and compassion with the illusion that we are gods. Porn is the glittering façade, like the casinos and resorts of Las Vegas, like the rest of the fantasy that is America, of a culture seduced by death.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for ‘integrity’ is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word ‘honesty’ mean? Or ‘Motherland’? Or ‘progress’? Or ‘democracy’? Or ‘beauty’? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.

Words of an old soul's heart, Portrayal of the matrix art To break from the illusion Of your continuous delusion No chapter good or bad, Not happy, neither sad. Attachement to desire, The heart sparks inner fire.

Writers, by nature, are going to be slightly more delusional than others because we're dreamers, we imagine the unlikely, that's how we create... Rather than hoping my delusion becomes a reality, I'd prefer to keep on being deluded, to dream bigger and to imagine greater. My greater worry would be becoming less delusional .