Quotes About Delusion

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

The same people who are coldly clear-eyed about the world around them have nothing but fantasies about themselves.

modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. . . They are in a particular panic over things they can't even see--germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. . . Like the belief in witchcraft, it's an extraordinary delusion--a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages.

That was the reason the casino bothered to list the wheel's most recent spins: to help gamblers to delude themselves.

The larger the number of people involved, the easier it was for them to delude themselves that what they were doing must be smart.

For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.

Delia picked at the raw sores of her conscience...Drunk or sober, Delia lived in the small town in her heart, ignoring the world in which all her love had turned to grief.

Capgras syndrome is a condition in which sufferers become convinced that those they know well are imposters. In Klüver-Bucy syndrome the victim develops urges to eat and fornicate indiscriminately (to the understandable dismay of loved ones).46 Perhaps the most bizarre of all is Cotard delusion, in which the sufferer believes he is dead and cannot be convinced otherwise.47

Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

De verbeelding kan dwazen niets wijs maken, maar ze maakt hen gelukkig.

What must one be, to rave year after year with delirious feverishness about nonexistent, long-extinct themes, and to know nothing, to see nothing around one!

while he was in hospital he became very agitated, saying that he needed to go back to the minotaurs because the minotaurs would have his dinner.

Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil.

The self," Blackmore writes, "is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self," she argues, "only multiple parallel processes that give rise to a benign inner delusion—a useful fiction." She argues that consciousness itself is a fiction. The

Sometimes I wanted to believe something so badly, I deliberately manufactured excuses and ignored painful reality.

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

Who is a bigger idiot than the man who believes the lies he tells himself?

Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same? The observance of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly.

First of all, Saddam did not win the war, even though he says he did, I mean, you know, that's a joke and everybody in the world knows it.

As pathetic as it was, she'd rather hold on to the possibility of something perfect than be hit with the reality of nothing much.

I don't want to impose a retrospective clarity of will on what had certainly been months immersed in a flailing muddle, but if there isn't some truth to the narratives of progress with which we sometimes try to frame our lives, however rooted in desperate delusion, we'd never be able to speak them, certainly not silently to ourselves, with any conviction.

It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.

Orthodox spirituality recognizes delusion as a genuine danger (plani in Greek, prelest in Russian). The sure sign of someone far gone in delusion is a refusal to consider that she might be wrong.

Alcatraz actually knows a person named Brandon Sanderson. That man, however, is a fantasy writer and is therefore prone to useless bouts of delusion in literary form.