Quotes About Delusions

The delusions of self-love cannot be prevented, but intellectual misconceptions as to the means of achieving success may be corrected.

To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.

You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become. Just as the blacksmith says: 'By hammer and hand all Art doth stand,' just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves around his morning delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general believes that he alone is the preserver of society - and surely, surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us going.

Any delusions of Free Will he harbored now must be merely the prisoner rattling his cage. His curse lay in the fact that he saw the cage. He saw it!

How to start a war? Nurture your own latent hungers for power. Forget that only madmen pursue power for its own sake. Let such madmen gain power — even you. Let such madmen act behind their conventional masks of sanity. Whether their masks be fashioned from the delusions of defense or the theological aura of law, war will come. — Gowachin aphorism

What appealed to me about 'The Loved Ones' script was that it had this really theatrical element to it. I thought that the scope of this character is so broad, and there is so much fun to be had playing a crazy teenage loner. It was a great way to explore the delusions a mind can create.

Theology is a] web of contradictions and delusions.

Sometimes, the hallucinations are visual and olfactory was well and make the world full of actual threats into a writhing hell of inescapable terrorization. Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in lonelineness beyond all reckoning… between 5 and 13 percent of people with schizophrenia commit suicide.

It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions.

The same wakefulness the individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. This humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That's what subsequent generations lost. From New England's Puritans we inherited the idea that America is blessed and ordained by God above all nations, but lost the fear of wrath and retribution.

Our language and our minds are too limited to deal with anything but a fixed reality, regardless of whether such a thing exists. The best we can do is to update our delusions to fit the times. We live in an increasingly rational, science-based society. The religious metaphors of the past are no longer comforting. Science is whittling at them from every side. Humanity needs a metaphor that allows God and science to coexist, at least in our minds, for the next thousand years.

imagine where our current delusions about reality might lead us.

You come in all clammed up, defences in depth, alibi-systems long established, delusions full-blown. In order to have a chance of staying sober, or rather of staying dry and becoming sober, you've got to change. Nobody likes to change. What you really want, when you come into hospital, even for the second or third or ninth time, is to stay just who you are and not drink. That's not possible, of course. Jack-Who-Drinks has got to alter into Jack-Who-Does- Not -Drink- And -Likes-It.

Let, therefore, pious readers learn to hate and detest those profane   sophists, who thus deliberately corrupt and adulterate the Scriptures,   in order that they may give some color to their delusions.

The aging process is totally minimizing. Life in general is pretty minimizing because you have a lot of big ideas, and you have to battle the mistaken delusions and instability that come with youth.

We can call the attempt to refute theism by displaying the continuity of belief in God with primitive delusions the method of Anthropological intimidation.

A Zendo is not a peaceful haven but a furnace room for the combustion of our egotistical delusions.

Every encounter with human truth—Jane Austen deftly showing how little we know our own motives; Dickens revealing the meaning of "economy" in the cheerful and charitable housekeeping of Esther Summerson, his finest heroine; or Shakespeare offering us the foolish Lear, mad and childish and yet "every inch a king"—can expand the soul; it helps to set us free from the common delusions of our time, the lies we believe and the lies we tell. But

Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions of godhead.

When I was a kid, I thought I was the strongest man in the world. Then, the fastest runner and then the smartest person in the world. One by one my delusions got shut down. Now I just see myself as the lamest guy in the world.

After that I was free to enjoy the rest of my unforgettable vacation, and now that I had seen the life of the stars up close, I was cured once and for all of my delusions of fame.

I never found another like him, with so much passion and so many happy delusions, but then I never much looked.

Nick's right, you are psychotic. (Talon) The correct term is sociopathic and yes, I am. But at least I have no delusions about myself. (Zarek) Meaning? (Talon) Take your meaning wherever you can find it. (Zarek)

I have never encountered anything similar to this in patients I have known to be traumatized by humans, or in psychotic patients suffering from delusions.