Quotes About Delusion

But power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe power could overcome any barrier … including one's own ignorance.

It is my opinion that the isolated mind loses its purchase on reality all too easily and becomes prone to fantasy.

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

The idea that we're going to replace oil and natural gas with solar and wind, and nothing else, is a hallucinatory delusion.

In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.

To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing. [Es ist die große Täuschung der Moderne, dass die Naturgesetze uns die Welt erklären. Die Naturgesetze beschreiben die Welt, sie beschreiben die Gesetzmäßigkeiten. Aber sie erklären uns nichts.]

E eu devia ser louco de verdade, se esperava que uma boneca como aquela enlouquecesse juntamente comigo, assim por nada.

We deceive ourselves so easily. Especially when we enjoy believing a certain thing...

The faculty of deluding one's self that today's reality is the only true one, if on the one hand it affords us a support, on the other hand hurls us into a bottomless void, for the reason that today's reality is destined to discover itself an illusion tomorrow. And life knows no conclusion. It cannot know any. If tomorrow there were to be a conclusion, all would be over.

What are ghosts if not the hope that love continues beyond our ordinary senses? If ghosts are a delusion, then let me be deluded.

I remind myself that I know the difference between elusion and delusion. It is the separation between desire and belief. I know what separates the past from the present. What lies between then and now, it is but a moment, an easy thing to lose.

So illusion is delusion, and I have been Don Quixote, and nothing that I loved or dreamed existed. I am empty-handed now, a woman with an aching body. Lost. Weeping. Weeping. Saying yes to the analyst like a child.

WHAT a solemn thought, that our love to God will be measured by our everyday intercourse with men and the love it displays; and that our love to God will be found to be a delusion, except was its truth is proved in standing the test of daily life with our fellowmen.

Taking oneself to be the thinker of one's thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.

She was one of those shallow people who rewrote their own history and believed in the absolute truth of their own version.

Somebody out of touch with reality, when she jumped she probably thought she'd fly.

For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.

But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations.

Men live in a fantasy world. I know this because I am one, and I actually receive my mail there

Women believe that men are, in a sense, defective versions of women, Men believe that women are defective versions of men. Both genders are trapped in a delusion that their personal viewpoints are universal. That viewpoint—that each gender is a defective version of the other—is the root of all misunderstandings.

Practicality rules our perceptions. To survive, our tiny brains need to tame the blizzard of delusion generator information that threatens to overwhelm us. Our perceptions are wondrously flexible, transforming our worldview automatically and continuously until we find safe harbor in a comfortable delusion.

If, as you say, our minds are delusion generators, then we're all like blind and deaf sea captains shouting orders into the universe and hoping it makes a difference. We have no way of knowing what really works and what merely seems to work. So doesn't it make sense to try all the things that appear to work even if we can't be sure?