Quotes About Delusion

If his young companions have their own special delusions—D.L.'s that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive, Sternberg's that a body is a prison and not a shelter—Mark's is that he's the only person in the world who feels like the only person in the world. It's a solipsistic delusion.

Voter NOUN a paranoid schizophrenic who believes the voices promising them an alternate future are real.

while a deluded president can be replaced at the next election, one cannot replace a deluded population so easily.

I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.

Today, as in ancient Rome, when all avenues of success have been traveled and all prizes won, the final prize is the delusion of godhead.

The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism.

Still, there were moments when, against all reason, I thought I might be a genius. These moments were provoked not by any particular accomplishment but by cocaine and crystal methamphetamine — drugs that allow you to lean over a mirror with a straw up your nose, suck up an entire week's paycheck, and think, "God, I'm smart.

He secretly thinks he looks like Marlon Brando, but take a good look a young Marlin Perkins is more like it! Maybe that's what he sees in Annette Kelper—he's an animal lover.

They think rabbits lay eggs and a monkey jumped over the got-damn moon. Stupid bitches don't know shit. Rabbits don't lay no eggs. Go-rilla can't shoot no dice.

logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.

Women are odd," he said, to extricate himself. "Two or three of them have told me they're sure I modeled one of my characters on them. And they were complete strangers, women I'd had nothing to do with. What kind of delusion could that be?" "Lots of women are unhappy, so they console themselves with delusions.

Magical thinking makes you crazy — and renders everything possible.

You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

You don't come to live here [New York City] unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

It's a delusional painter who finishes a canvas at two o'clock and expects radical societal transformation by four. Even when artists write manifestos, they are (hopefully) aware that their exigent tone is, finally, borrowed, only echoing in mimicking the urgency of the guerrilla's demands, or the activist's protest, rather than truly enacting. The people sometimes demand change.

I guess there's something that's appealing to me about people that are aspirational-slash-deluded.

For all human sentiments there is a time of early blossoming, a day of generous enthusiasm that gradually fades until nothing is left of happiness but a memory, and glory is known for a delusion.

fairy was delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose.

it was a reality shared by all the world, and not merely an optical delusion confined to their own eyes in their own garden.

Marvelous, marvelous! All sentient beings have the Tathagata's wisdom and virtue, but they fail to realize it because they cling to deluded thoughts and attachments.

The result only reinforced Hitler's self-belief that he was a 'man of destiny', treading his path 'with the certainty of a sleepwalker'.

Nevertheless, we found no common thread that might point to an underlying psychopathology among the various witnesses from different locations and backgrounds. It is unlikely that fugue states, paraphrenic delusion, or groupthink were involved in all of the occurrences, although isolated episodes are difficult to refute on these grounds, particularly those in which only a single individual visually perceived and reported an event while a nearby colleague could see nothing.

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

We blunt our own conscience, darken our own judgment by self-interest, and rebuke in others the very vices for which we are famous. Each of us carries around a "deep and calm source of delusion, which undermines the whole principle of good."173