Quotes About Delusion

Sartre has called man a useless passion because he is so hopelessly bungled, so deluded about his true condition. He wants to be a god with only the equipment of an animal, and so he thrives on fantasies. As Ortega so well put it in the epigraph we have used for this chapter, man uses his ideas for the defense of his existence, to frighten away reality. This is a serious game, the defense of one's existence-how take it away from people and leave them joyous?

its pretty to think so

It was one of those things that gave you a false feeling of soldering.

Often we imagine that we will work hard...arrive at some distant goal, and then we will be happy. This is a delusion. Happiness is the result of a life lived with purpose. Happiness is not an objective. It is the movement of life itself, a process, an activity.

The promise of a social gospel was for Luther an irrelevant and ultimately irrelevant and ultimately cruel delusion.

Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?

What's horrible is when someone believes they are a star, and they have no vocal ability whatsoever.

It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you.

When I left Africa in 1966 it seemed to me to be a place that was developing, going in a particular direction, and I don't think that is the case now. And it's a place where people still kid themselves - you know, in a few years this will happen or that will happen. Well, it's not going to happen. It's never going to happen.

The world in general has meaning, deep meaning at times. This cannot be dismissed as a delusion, an artifact of chemicals.

Anything that consoles is fake.

To fool somebody else, you have to fool yourself first.

Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider's web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.

However, Strike knew that the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth.

the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth.

Man's ability to indulge in self-deception knows no bounds.

An insane delusion can't be held by a group at all. A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way…. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.

Buddha believed that the less you judge things—including the contents of your mind—the more clearly you'll see them, and the less deluded you'll be.

ambition without implementation is a ridiculous delusion.

an organization that has a culture where everyone's afraid to speak candidly is a place where people live amid delusion and fantasy

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.

W]ith the disappearance of divine caring, i.e., of a caring by beings which in the eyes of everyone are superior to men, it became inevitable that every art or every man should believe itself or himself to be as much entitled to rule as every other art or every other man, or that at least many arts should become competitors of the kingly art. The inevitable first consequence of the transition from the age of Kronos to the age of Zeus was the delusion that all arts and all men are equal.