Quotes About Disillusionment

Michel Houellebecq

Et voilà comment une civilisation meurt… une civilisation meurt juste par lassitude, par dégoût d'elle-même…

La chispa de curiosidad que subsistía en mi forma de mirar el mundo se apagaría pronto y sería como las piedras, con el añadido de un vago sufrimiento. Mi carrera no había sido un fracaso, al menos en términos comerciales: si agredes al mundo con suficiente violencia, él te acaba escupiendo su cochina pasta; pero nunca, nunca te devuelve la alegría.

La felicidad no era un horizonte posible. El mundo nos había traicionado.

I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.

Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing.

The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you're lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.

Affairs are just as disillusioning as marriage, and much less restful.

Pero si una persona se toma unos momentos para reflexionar, el desencanto vuelve: tras cada éxito se ve con mayor claridad que el dinero, el poder, la posición social y las posesiones, por sí mismas, no añaden ni un ápice a la calidad de vida.

Turns out I was wrong. Truth is I just couldn't do it any more.

I hated life in the Soviet Union. You had to pretend something you didn't feel.

I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.

What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.

Sunja was a pragmatic woman, but even she thought Hansu was unusually cruel. The more she got to know this man, the more she realized that the man she'd loved as a girl was an idea she'd had of him – feelings without any verification.

Failure and disillusionment are realities, but ideologies are made of dreams. And dreams, it would seem, do not fade easily.

Working-class and lower-middle-class people across the developed world have lost confidence in their ability to achieve the life that their parents enjoyed during the heyday of the postwar boom.

What the deuce does he mean by all this? I thought I had found a clever man who would give me good advice, and I find a chimney-sweep, who, instead of speaking to me, plays at mora.

I joined the air force. I took to it immediately when I arrived there. I did three years, eight months, and ten days in all, but it took me a year and a half to get disabused of my romantic notions about it.

Even her radiant beauty seemed to dim as he thought of the way she had fooled him.

School motto's are not what they exactly produce! Our motto was education is wealth, but look how I am.

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

He was the great love of her life you know.' 'Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly, 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.

Oh dear... it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?

Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can't titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. Tod