Quotes About Delusion

Dans Horizons rouges, j'ai essayé de peindre la vie quotidienne à la cour d'un dictateur communiste. CeauÈ™escu rêve d'être vénéré comme un nouveau Roi-Soleil, être reconnu par l'Histoire comme le Napoléon roumain et sa femme fait des efforts désespérés pour être considérée comme la déesse roumaine de la sagesse et de l'élégance. (Préface à l'édition française)

I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.

Now a human caught in an impossibility often responds by a retreat from reality: by entry into a world of delusion, or by taking to drink, going of into hysteria, or jumping off a bridge. It all comes to the same thing-a refusal or inability to face the situation squarely.

All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos.

Could a man really know what was best for him? How easily men were deluded by a word, a smile, a gesture.

We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we at last come to look upon them as virtues.

A fool always finds one still more foolish to admire him.

Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.

The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.

At the beginning of this War megalomania was the only form of sanity.

On the delusional theory of consciousness

I want to tell the rebels that I am alive. That I'm right here in District Eight, where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women, and children. There will be no survivors." The shock I've been feeling begins to give way to fury. "I want to tell people that if you think for one second the Capitol will treat us fairly if there's a cease-fire, you're deluding yourself. Because you know who they are and what they do.

I saw my reflection in their eyes, but not the men themselves, not clearly. This preserved the idea that all intelligent and even vaguely attractive men were essentially good. Delusion detest focus and romance provides the veil.

But we see also many souls whose light is only a dim spark because they are still slumbering in the delusion of separation.

I have been extraordinarily lucky. Anyone who pretends that some kind of luck isn't involved in his success is deluding himself.

Anyone looking for confirmation will find enough of it to deceive himself—and no doubt his peers.*

It struck me, a belief that has never left me since, that we are just a great machine for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion.

So we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable.

than others at whatever we do for a living. Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers; 84 percent of Frenchmen feel that their lovemaking abilities put them in the top half of French lovers.

investors are led to overestimate their chances of success.

The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together—the same process that makes you know less also makes you satisfied with your knowledge.

Self-respect is the conviction of our own value. It is not the delusion that we are "perfect" or superior to everyone else. It is not comparative or competitive at all.

Don Quixote - the famous literary madman - fought windmills. People think he saw giants when he looked at them, but those of us who've been there know the truth. He saw windmills, just like everyone else - but he believed they were giants. The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you're suddenly going to believe.

But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is. -Connor