Delusion Quotes

1. "Celebrity gives us delusion of self importance."
Author: Al Goldstein

2. "And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, "You'd better hurry then, you know how how is," and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband's failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in thier marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft's transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage--which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn--simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.A repository, Pauline and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that Mary Keane should have kept to herself."
Author: Alice McDermott

3. "The virtues of free enterprise can become distorted by greed & delusion."
Author: Allan Lokos

4. "Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it."
Author: Anthony Storr

5. "Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?"
Author: Bill Watterson

6. "I'm so incredibly tired of giving respect to a lot of delusions and crazy ideas just because they are regarded as religions."
Author: Bjorn Ulvaeus

7. "Think of the rivers of blood, spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters, of a fraction of a dot...our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe - are challenged by that point of pale light."
Author: Carl Sagan

8. "Taste of metal on my tongue. Poison the color of envy-I'm delirious, you're delicious, I'm deluded and delusional.I'm lost without you. I need you."
Author: Cecily Von Ziegesar

9. "It's [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren't even young and beautiful now."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

10. "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."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

11. "[The public intellectual] will also describe how she can work a pop culture reference into her essay, comparing the Supreme Court to the creature in the number-one box office movie of the moment. Editors like this sort of mass-media integration, first, because it gives them a way to illustrate the piece, and second because they are under the delusion that pop-culture references will propel a piece's readership into the five-digit area."
Author: David Brooks

12. "De Morgan was explaining to an actuary what was the chance that a certain proportion of some group of people would at the end of a given time be alive; and quoted the actuarial formula, involving p [pi], which, in answer to a question, he explained stood for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. His acquaintance, who had so far listened to the explanation with interest, interrupted him and exclaimed, 'My dear friend, that must be a delusion, what can a circle have to do with the number of people alive at a given time?"
Author: De Morgan

13. "The imagination can be a kind of wilderness, too, in fact a wasteland, if you allow it to take you into one bleak and grotesque place after another, for you can imagine yourself into all kinds of paranoid delusions and even into madness."
Author: Dean Koontz

14. "After all your years climbing around in people's heads like a cranial janitor, do you think people know why they do things? People rationalize, they turn their delusions into something romantic that they can disguise as ethics or principles or ideals. People are selfish, Doctor- odiously, monstrously, but in so small and paltry a monstrousness that we barely notice it."
Author: Dennis Lehane

15. "Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion."
Author: Edward Abbey

16. "There is no wilderness so dreary but that His love can illuminate it, no desolation so desolate but that He can sweeten it. I know what I am saying. It is no delusion. I believe the highest, purest happiness is known only to those who have learned Christ in sickrooms, in poverty, in racking suspense and anxiety, amid hardships, and at the open grave."
Author: Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

17. "Per avere una visione nera del mondo bisogna infatti averci prima creduto. Ed è ancora più curioso e paradossale il fatto che i pessimisti, una volta delusi, non siano costantemente e sistematicamente disperati, e che in un certo senso sembrino disposti a rinnovare la loro speranza in ogni momento, pur dissimulandosi dietro la nera apparenza di amareggiati universali, in virtù di una sorta di pudore metafisico, come se il pessimismo, per conservarsi sempre forte e vigoroso avesse bisogno ogni tanto di una nuova e micidiale delusione."
Author: Ernesto Sabato

18. "Too often we bask in our comfortable complacency and rationalize that the ravages of war, economic disaster, famine, and earthquake cannot happen here. Those who believe this are either not acquainted with the revelations of the Lord, or they do not believe them. Those who smugly think these calamities will not happen, that they somehow will be set aside because of the righteousness of the Saints, are deceived and will rue the day they harbored such a delusion.The Lord has warned and forewarned us against a day of great tribulation and given us counsel, through His servants, on how we can be prepared for these difficult times. Have we heeded His counsel?[Ensign, Nov. 1980, 34]"
Author: Ezra Taft Benson

19. "I maintain that (as usual) many sides exist to this issue rather than only two. Two-sided issues (creationism vs darwinism, "choice" vs "pro-life," etc.) are all without exception delusions, spectacular lies."
Author: Hakim Bey

20. "One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions."
Author: Horace

21. "Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, "the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad"
Author: Huston Smith

22. "Delusions are a vital part of my existence."
Author: Jason Krumbine

23. "Oh, wait a minute, I was supposed to be cutting back on the self-delusion, wasn't I? Whoops."
Author: Jason Krumbine

24. "I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research."
Author: John Forbes Nash Jr.

25. "Create delusion. Establish doubt. Feed paranoia."
Author: John Katzenbach

26. "What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?''History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly.'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ...'Finn?''"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)"
Author: Julian Barnes

27. "I felt the electricity of his body behind me as he reached around me and took the card from my hand. He didn't move away, and I battled the urge to lean back into him, seeking the comfort of his strength. Would he wrap his arms around me? Make me feel safe, if only for a moment, and if only a delusion?"
Author: Karen Marie Moning

28. "Velvet looks horrified. "If you are fool enough to address King R'jan, you will do it thus and in no other manner! ‘My King, Liege, Lord, and Master, your servant begs you grant it leave to speak.'""Wow. Totally delusionary there.""Good luck with that," Ryodan says. "She doesn't beg to speak, or do anything else. You can lock her up, down, and sideways and it's never going to happen."I beam at him. I had no idea he thought so highly of me."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

29. "Love is for weak people, its a delusion and it can be deadly" -Delos Redfern (Black Dawn)"
Author: L.J. Smith

30. "All you had to say was, 'I am a writer,' and you became one. You didn't even have to write anything. You could just sit in a coffee shop with a notebook and stare into space, with a slightly bemused look on your face, judging the weight of the world with a jaundiced eye. As you can see, you can be completely full of shit and still be a writer...I also thought it was going to be a great way to meet girls, but it wasn't--probably because as I was staring into space, I no doubt looked mildly retarded. You see, I wanted to write plays, which in retrospect is a lot harder than learning Mandarin, I think. How I ended up in this delusional state shall be saved for another time."
Author: Lewis Black

31. "Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better."
Author: Louisa May Alcott

32. "It occurs to him that there are different versions of himself to farewell—the abandoned eight-year-old; the delusional soldier who hovered somewhere in hell; the lightkeeper who dared to leave his heart undefended. Like Russian dolls, these lives sit within him."
Author: M.L. Stedman

33. "He forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures."
Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon

34. "The Air Loom, if Matthews revealed its existence under questioning, would now be recognised immediately as a classic paranoid delusion. But in 1797 it was something that had never been encountered before, and would emerge as the baffling leitmotif of a case that was unprecedented in almost every imaginable way."
Author: Mike Jay

35. "In a heart that has drowned itself in the awareness of true jñana, which is wholly love, bliss in its fullness will surge forth. Tormenting desires that arise through delusion do not exist there. That life, existing as the extremely pure svarupa, is wholly peace."
Author: Muruganar

36. "Man's conscious state is an awareness of body and breath. His subconscious state, active in sleep, is associated with his mental, and temporary, separation from body and breath. His superconscious state is a freedom from the delusion that "existence" depends on body and breath. God lives without breath; the soul made in his image becomes conscious of itself, for the first time, only during the breathless state."
Author: Paramahansa Yogananda

37. "A ladder's a flag pole with delusions of grandeur."
Author: Peter Clines

38. "Vision is an idle dream at best and a cynical delusion at worst - but not an achievable end"
Author: Peter M. Senge

39. "So what to do? . . . She shook her head impatiently. Choice is a largely delusional concept, her tutor used to say. Whether in politics, morals or shopping, we have far less than we imagine. In the end what we have to do often doesn't even figure on our list of pseudo-options."
Author: Reginald Hill

40. "A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence."
Author: Richard Dawkins

41. "Dimitri: "Don't look at me like that."Rose: "Like what?"Dimitri: "You've got this look on your face that says you think I'm delusional, but you're too nice to say anything."
Author: Richelle Mead

42. "I no longer follow the voices of the sane. I follow the ill because they see farther, feel much more and change what the sane will not. This is the paradox of philosophers---trying to understand mass delusion among great people that have faith and knowledge, yet they can't graduate from their institutions of religious theology to apply the knowledge they have gained for the shifting of Zion---- from words to action; from comfort to uncomfortable; from self serving to self giving; from competition to supporting; to tradition to unity; from bias to acceptance; from me to us."
Author: Shannon L. Alder

43. "All genuine epiphanies seem to follow this model: their defining quality is the relinquishment of delusion. The initial fear is that one has lost something. A cherished self-conception must be given up, and one feels diminished by it. This is mistaken, however. A person discovers that he has been made stronger by the jettisoning of this sham and disadvantageous baggage. In fact, he has become more "himself," by aligning his self-concept more closely with fact."
Author: Steven Pressfield

44. "I want to laugh one of those strange, high-pitched, delusional laughs that signals the end of a person's sanity. Because this world, I think, has a terrible, terrible sense of humor. It always seems to be laughing at me. At my expense. Making my life infinitely more complicated all the time. Running all of my best-laid plans by making every choice so difficult. Making everything so confusing."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

45. "Confidence is 10% hard work and 90% delusion."
Author: Tina Fey

46. "Thanks pal, but I tend to avoid any substance that makes me feel smarter, stronger, or better looking than I know I actually am." There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs, and on a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger. Should he ever aspire to become voluntarily delusional, then good old-fashioned alcohol would do the job effectively and inexpensively, thank you, and without the dubious bonus of jaw-clenching jitters."
Author: Tom Robbins

47. "My hopes rose every time the phone rang, but it was never him. I concocted stories in my mind of every possible scenario where he would come for me or call me and declare his feelings. We would run far away together, where his father could never find us.In other words, I was delusional."
Author: Wendy Higgins

48. "Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice."
Author: William Hazlitt

49. "The true Mind is one that exists before and beyond one's delusional, self-centered, attachment-filled mind."
Author: Woo Myung

50. "...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends , there's nothing left."
Author: Zoë Heller

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