Elusion Quotes

1. "In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts."
Author: Alain De Botton

2. "I have had to work long and hard to eradicate the dangerous delusion that, in a bad position, I could always, or nearly always, conjure up some unexpected combination to extricate me from my difficulties."
Author: Alexander Alekhine

3. "The ignorant mind, with its infinite afflictions, passions, and evils, is rooted in the three poisons. Greed, anger, and delusion."
Author: Bodhidharma

4. ". . . Golden would find himself thinking that if he ever became delusional or foolhardy enough to outfit one of his houses with a complaint box, it would need to be about the size of a refrigerator."
Author: Brady Udall

5. "Daydreams are the delusions of the devil."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

6. "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."
Author: Chirag Tulsiani

7. "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

8. "We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

9. "The truth, if I can confront it, is I know my dream to become a writer is impossible and will never happen. The people outside of the machine are always more likely to connect with my words than the people within. The truth is: I'm not in this park to follow my dream. I'm here because my landlord put my rent up. I could no longer afford to sustain my private depression. My debts were growing. My place of employment could have helped me, but I was met with the cold back of the system. So I left, deciding it was better to be homeless than participating in the social collective delusion of success and happiness through the medium of a desk job."
Author: Craig Stone

10. "Science is the struggle to avoid self-delusions or at least not to appear too delusional to others."
Author: D.A. Blankinship

11. "Supposedly, the government is in the process of saving us from terrorists. No one has quite figured out who is going to save us from the government. It seems it will have to be us. Part of what we built works great. Part of what we built badly needs fixing. It is delusional to think that a few politicians can fix what took several hundred million people to build—and run down."
Author: Doug Ten Rose

12. "To read is not a virtue; but to read well is an art, and an art that only the born reader can acquire. The gift of reading is no exception to the rule that all natural gifts need to be cultivated by practice and discipline; but unless the innate aptitude exist the training will be wasted. It is the delusion of the mechanical reader to think that intentions may take the place of aptitude."
Author: Edith Wharton

13. "Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences — nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon."
Author: Eric Hoffer

14. "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

15. "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

16. "Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead."
Author: Gail Caldwell

17. "Bronn himself, who'd only smiled that insolent dark smile of his and afterward said, "They'll kill for that knighthood, but don't ever think they'll die for it."Tyrion had no such delusion."
Author: George R.R. Martin

18. "Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them."
Author: George Saunders

19. "Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you"
Author: Ginnetta Correli

20. "Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free."
Author: H.L. Mencken

21. "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

22. "Schizophrenia: A psychotic disorderncharacterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations. See also: Nightmare."
Author: Holly Schindler

23. "[...] And suddenly Vincent clearly realised what his subconsciousness had known for a long time. All the talks about God are just childish elusion, just a lie that calms a scared and lonely ordinary mortal in a dark and neverending night. There is no God. Sure as fate - there is no God. There is only chaos - dismal, painful, cruel, agonizing, blind, endless chaos."
Author: Irving Stone

24. "The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite."
Author: James Hillman

25. "Free will (noun):A delusional idea that humans are in control of their own destiny and not subject to the benevolent rule of The One Who Is The One."
Author: James Patterson

26. "Being exceptional isn't revolutionary, it's lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community? I have been held up consistently as a token, as the "right" kind of trans woman (educated, able-bodied, attractive, articulate, heteronormative). It promotes the delusion that because I "made it," that level of success is easily accessible to all young trans women. Let's be clear: It is not."
Author: Janet Mock

27. "I'm sure that you psychotic necro-wannabes with delusions of godhood are all about sharing with your fellow maniacs."
Author: Jim Butcher

28. "You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom."
Author: Jon Kabat Zinn

29. "There is always Joker to see through the delusion. Generation succeeds generation, but there is a fool walking the earth who is never ravaged by time."
Author: Jostein Gaarder

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

31. "On Internment, you can be anything you dream--a novelist or a singer, a florist or a factory worker. You can spend entire afternoons watching clouds so close it's as though you're riding on them. Your life is yours to embrace or to squander. There's only one rule: You don't approach the edge. If you do, it's already over. My brother is proof of that. He has successfully quieted my delusions I held about seeing the ground for myself."
Author: Lauren DeStefano

32. "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

33. "People enjoy the passion of delusions. However, the world is built on a basis that if you free yourself, you find yourself within another illusion. There is always a truth hidden within a truth. It is no different from illusions and deceptions of reality. The question then becomes -- how does one become truly free?"
Author: Lionel Suggs

34. "Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth."
Author: Ludwig Borne

35. "Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time.Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction."
Author: Mahatma Gandhi

36. "All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion."
Author: Marcus Aurelius

37. "...then he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself... In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e. his essence. Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself."
Author: Martin Heidegger

38. "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

39. "She wanted to blame him, to blame her whole rotton existence. But seeing Ethan, seeing her mother, seeing the world after the world she had known, somehow took her to the very bottom, the end of self-delusion, and the truth enveloped her like a cocoon, and all she said was "I was so lonely." And Father Time said, "You were never alone."
Author: Mitch Albom

40. "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

41. "It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money."
Author: P.J. O'Rourke

42. "I used to think I was a singer; I had my own delusions about it."
Author: Randy Jackson

43. "I spoke of the tragic illusion of perpetuity, but, no, my friends, it is a comic one. The ludicrous plot in which we are all trapped. The ancient Greeks referred to plot as mythos, attributing the random drift of human affairs to some sort of unknowable but glimpsable divine motion, attempting to attach a certain grandeur to it, the delusion of meaning. But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving."
Author: Robert Coover

44. "Delusions are hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding insane people living in a backwards world."
Author: Shannon L. Alder

45. "None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! A mantle of marble hiding a crumbling core of sandstone. See how they stare at me, wondering, all wondering, at my secret wellspring of wisdom...' Let's kill him,' Crokus muttered, 'if only to put him out of our misery."
Author: Steven Erikson

46. "This requires a level of delusion/egomania usually reserved for popes and drag queens"
Author: Tina Fey

47. "Trying to Enjoy It (Proceed as if You Look Awesome)...This requires a level of delusion/egomania usually reserved for popes and drag queens, but you can do it. It's like being a little kid again, parading around in a nightgown tucked into your underpants, believing it looks terrific. Your "right mind" knows that you look ridiculous in a half-open dress and giant shoes, but you must put yourself back in third grade, slipping on your mom's quilted caftan and drinking cream soda out of a champagne glass while watching The Love Boat. You have never been more glamorous."
Author: Tina Fey

48. "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

49. "He had delusions of adequacy."
Author: Walter Kerr

50. "The left-hand path adept seeks to liberate him/herself from passive subjection to the illusory nature of Maya, thus freeing the consciousness from the binds of self-created delusion."
Author: Zeena Schreck

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