Self Delusion Quotes

1. "An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us."
Author: Adrienne Rich

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. "Worship means reverence and humility it means revering your real self and humbling delusions."
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. "That's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion."
Author: Brandon Sanderson

6. "Once, maybe I would have thought you a fool, but...well, that's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion? You have to shut out that voice that whispers about betrayal, and just hope that your friends aren't going to hurt you."
Author: Brandon Sanderson

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. "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."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

9. "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."
Author: Dan Simmons

10. "The child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows. Now warm, now chill, next joyous, then despairing, the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him, no matter how stable, even loving. No ties, no binding chains, save those he forges for himself. Or so he thinks. But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it. Therefore create. Act God. Fashion men and women as Prometheus fashioned them from clay, and, by doing this, work out the unconscious strife within and be reconciled. While in others, imbued with a desire to mold, to instruct, to spread a message that will inspire the reader and so change his world, though the motive may be humane and even noble--many great works have done just this--the source is the same dissatisfaction, a yearning to escape."
Author: Daphne Du Maurier

11. "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

12. "Through this process, wisdom clarifies the way that the mind manufacturers emotion and karma, and finally penetrates the illusion of self. Just as though one were investigating how a magician created his display of illusions, one studies mental events to understand the conditions and causes that support the operation of ordinary self-oriented experience. One first understands the root emotions as the basis for samsara, then studies the workings of the associated emotions and how each one manifests a distinctive character. Gradually, the manner in which the self supports emotion and emotion supports the sense of self becomes clear. Self and emotion are seen as relying on and reinforcing each other's existence. Understanding how this collusion gives rise to the whole range of samsaric delusion liberates the mind from all forms of deception."
Author: Dharma Publishing

13. "My dear man,' said Lymond, ‘he was keeping the numbers down. If we hadn't taken precautions the whole of the noble Order of St John would be disporting itself at St Mary's under the delusion that it was earning merit by converting us to the Cross. As it is, another half dozen are due any day. Alec, now you've kept us right, I'd be grateful if you would see if the head of the column knows what the hell it's doing without you. Jerott, it won't help us in an ambush if the rearguard is agonizing silently over Joleta's jeopardized soul. Forget the brat. Remember, we're common, coarse fighting-men, not a heavenly host in our shifts."
Author: Dorothy Dunnett

14. "You cannot stare evil in the face; it has no face. It has no body, no bones, no blood. Any attempt to describe it ends in glibness and self-delusion."
Author: Douglas Preston

15. "... Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion!..."Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust."
Author: Émile Zola

16. "Self editing is the path to the dark side. Self editing leads to self delusion, self delusion leads to missed mistakes, missed mistakes lead to bad reviews. Bad reviews are the tools of the dark side."
Author: Eric T. Benoit

17. "And so, onwards... along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence.. however you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through- false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes- into your goal, with nothing left over."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "The Spirit and theWord must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone without the Word, I lay myself open to great delusionsalso. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, He will do it according to the Scriptures and never contrary to them."
Author: George Mueller

19. "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

20. "Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion."
Author: Glen Duncan

21. "We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease."
Author: H.L. Mencken

22. "Self-mortification, far from producing liberation from material things, is far more likely to cause either an unhinged mind, delusions or a masochistic taste for more suffering, experienced, of course, as joy."
Author: Idries Shah

23. "…depressive realism. Depression is not the near death experience described by so many, [Kayla Dunn] suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more realistic in their worldview."
Author: Jan Wong

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

25. "We all need a bit of self-delusion. It gets us over the difficult spots." - John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium"
Author: John Ralston Saul

26. "I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless."
Author: John Steinbeck

27. "History: the lies of the victors, the self-delusions of the defeated."
Author: Julian Barnes

28. "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

29. "Of course, that rationalization didn't work at all. It would have helped if I'd had some Oreo cookie ice cream to eat that the same time. I've learned that self-delusion is much easier when there's something sweet in your mouth."
Author: Lee Goldberg

30. "Correct the blunders on your face made through self-delusion – this would be far more fitting than to want to teach me, which is just as if a sow trying to teach Minerva."
Author: Luella Christie

31. "To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth, or heal our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves."
Author: Lynn Margulis

32. "...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

33. "If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion."
Author: Max Scheler

34. "Falling in love for the first time is a completely transcendent experience. It's like eating pizza-flavored ice cream. Your brain can't even process that level of joy. Love makes people do crazy things like kill other people or shop at Crate & Barrel. I think on some level it makes us all delusional. Deep down, our whole lives, no matter how low our self-esteem gets, we think, I have a special skill that no one knows about and if they knew they'd be amazed. And then eventually we meet someone who says, "You have a secret special skill." And you're like, "I know! So do you!" And they're like, "I know!" And then you're like, "We should eat pizza ice cream together." And that's what love is. It's this giant mound of pizza-flavored ice cream and delusion"
Author: Mike Birbiglia

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. "Life isn't about having, it's about being. You could surround yourself with all that money can buy, and you'd still be as miserable as a human can be. I know people with perfect bodies who don't have half the happiness I've found. On my journeys I've seen more joy in the slums of Mumbai and the orphanages of Africa than in wealthy gated communities and on sprawling estates worth millions. Why is that? You'll find contentment when your talents and passion are completely engaged, in full force. Recognise instant self-gratification for what it is. Resist the temptation to grab for material objects like the perfect house, the coolest clothes or the hottest car. The if I just had X, I would be happy syndrome is a mass delusion. When you look for happiness in mere objects, they are never enough. Look around. Look within."
Author: Nick Vujicic

37. "Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored."
Author: Paul Hoffman

38. "Self-delusion is pulling in your stomach when you step on the scales."
Author: Paul Sweeney

39. "...We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people."
Author: Ray Bradbury

40. "They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answer to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are lost people."
Author: Ray Bradbury

41. "The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something."
Author: Richard Dawkins

42. "Elliot Rawley was a drinker, Cy's mother had been right. And he was a poor drinker. One that let the demons of the bottle into his head when he tipped it back, demons that went about unloosing all the trouble they could find stashed in the catacombs of his mind. Every tragic thing that had ever happened, every self-doubt, every delusion, freed itself from bondage and revisited him when he drank."
Author: Sarah Hall

43. "If you are proven to be right a hundred times in a row,no amount of evidence will convince you that you are mistakenin the hundred-and-first case. You will be seduced byyour own apparent infallibility. Remember that all scientificexperiments are performed by human beings and the resultsare subject to human interpretation. The human mind is adelusion generator, not a window to truth. Everyone, includingskeptics, will generate delusions that match their views.That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics arenot exempt from self-delusion."
Author: Scott Adams

44. "Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart."
Author: Sebastian Faulks

45. "I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory."
Author: Terry Gross

46. "What was the nature of the universe into which she had been born? Why did it exist at all? If it had a purpose, what was it? These seemed to her the only questions worth exploring. And the only valid technique evolved by humans for exploring such questions was the scientific method, a robust and self-correcting search for the truth. Yet it had become obvious to her since about the age of twelve that science as it had progressed so far – physics, chemistry, biology, all the rest – had only inched towards grappling with the true questions, the fundamentals. Those questions had only been addressed by theologians and philosophers, it seemed to her. Unfortunately, their answers were a mush of doubt, self-delusion and flummery that had probably done more harm than good. And yet that was all there was."
Author: Terry Pratchett

47. "The Necrotelicomnicon was written by a Klatchian necromancer known to the world as Achmed the Mad, although he preferred to be called Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches. It is said that the book was written in one day after Achmed drank too much of the strange thick Klatchian coffee which doesn't just sober you up, but takes you through sobriety and out the other side, so that you glimpse the real universe beyond the clouds of warm self-delusion that sapient life usually generates around itself to stop it turning into a nutcake. Little is known about his life prior to this event, because the page headed 'About the Author' spontaneously combusted shortly after his death. However, a section headed 'Other Books By the Same Author' indicates that his previous published work was Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches's Book of Humorous Cat Stories, which might explain a lot."
Author: Terry Pratchett

48. "Reclaimed by the small-time day-to-day, pretending life is Back To Normal, wrapping herself shivering against contingency's winter in some threadbare blanket of first-quarter expenses, school committees, cable-bill irregularities, a workday jittering with low-life fantasies for which "fraud" is often too elegant a term, upstairs neighbors to whom bathtub caulking is an alien concept, symptoms upper-respiratory and lower-intestinal, all in the quaint belief that change will always be gradual enough to manage, with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody's towering delusions about being exempt. . ."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

49. "It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy."
Author: Thornton Wilder

50. "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

Self Delusion Quotes Pictures