Quotes About Delusion

People love to yammer on about things that aren't real.

I just love the delusional, hallucinatory qualities of sleep deprivation. I can't get enough of it.

He had no intention of removing the tumor. It was the perfect solution to his dilemma: how to feed his body's desire for intimacy. He was delusional, of course. There was no higher presence filling him with love, connecting him to all things. It only felt that way. But that was fine. That was ideal. He would not have trusted a God outside his head.

A dedication to irrationality grows more difficult to renounce with each reiteration of unreason, for the deluded must increasingly face the shame not only of his folly but of the misery it begets. As the tally grows, the likelihood of self-correction diminishes; and the committed one-worlder, now chained to his oars, must insulate himself against both reality and countervailing opinion. He does so handily by demonizing those trying to restore him to sanity.

The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

How painful and absurd, this fantasy that your own labors might in turn be redeemed by strangers centuries and perhaps continents away who would need to hear what you had to whisper, this delusion that you were doing anything other than babbling because you like the sounds it makes, like a child blowing bubbles into milk.

Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination.

I feel as if one would only discover on one's death-bed what one ought to have lived for, and realise too late that one's life has been wasted. Any passionate and courageous life seems good in itself, yet one feels that some element of delusion is involved in giving so much passion to any humanly attainable object. And so irony creeps into the very springs of one's being.

The lunatic who thinks he is a crowned head may be, in a sense, happy, but his happiness is not of a kind that any sane person would envy.

Let us not delude ourselves with the hope that the best is within the reach of all, or that emotion uniformed by thought can ever attain the highest level. All such optimisms seem to me dangerous to civilisation, and the outcome of a heart not yet sufficiently mortified.

One comes across white men occasionally who suffer under the delusion that China is not a civilized country. Such men have forgotten what constitutes civilization.

Hegel thought of the universe as a closely knit unity. His universe was like a jelly in the fact that, if you touched any one part of it, the whole quivered; but it was unlike a jelly in the fact that it could not really be cut up into parts. The appearance of consisting of parts, according to him, was a delusion.

He feeds on ashes. His deceived mind has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself, or say, "Isn't there a lie in my right hand?" Isaiah 44:20

The tale of Enron is a story of human weakness, of hubris and greed and rampant self-delusion; of ambition run amok; of a grand experiment in the deregulated world; of a business model that didn't work; and of smart people who believed their next gamble would cover their last disaster—and who couldn't admit they were wrong.

What I've found in my research is that realism and self-honesty are the antidote to ego, hubris, and delusion.

I think people need fantasy, but I think they also need to know that they're not being lied to. I think sometimes the fantasy can betray people and become more difficult for people's lives than just truth. I can't stand delusion. Delusion makes me sick.

I knew I had to just keep believing, never lose sight of my purpose. As a fighter, you need to be delusional in a way. It keeps you going.

It's one thing to lie to ourselves. It's another thing to believe it.

All genuine epiphanies seem to follow this model: their defining quality is the relinquishment of delusion. The initial fear is that one has lost something. A cherished self-conception must be given up, and one feels diminished by it. This is mistaken, however. A person discovers that he has been made stronger by the jettisoning of this sham and disadvantageous baggage. In fact, he has become more "himself," by aligning his self-concept more closely with fact.

All genuine epiphanies seem to follow this model: their defining quality is the relinquishment of delusion.

A lot of people were mistaken about a lot of things.

If people believe you're brave you may not only half believe them but even draw a spurious courage from their delusion.

When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.

The delusion of entertainment is devoid of meaning. It may amuse us for a bit, but after the initial hit we are left with the dark feeling of desolation.