Delusion Quotes

“One sees more devils than vast hell can hold”

“This is the very coinage of your brain: this bodiless creation ecstasy.”

“As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.”

“Methought I was enamour'd of an ass.”

“Hope is a delusion; no hand can grasp a wave or a shadow.”

“We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.”

“From attachment comes longing, and longing breeds anger. From anger comes delusion, and from delusion, confused memory. From confused memory comes the ruin of discrimination; and from the ruin of discrimination, a man perishes.”

“The effect is delusion, and therefore the cause must be delusion.”

“Go on saying, I am free. Never mind if the next moment delusion comes and says, I am bound. Dehypnotize the whole thing.”

“First get rid of the delusion "I am the body," then only will we want real knowledge.”

“We must always bear in mind that we are not going to be free, but are free already. Every idea that we are bound is a delusion.”

“Idle man, chases after fairy tales.”

“Mistakes live in the neighbourhood of truth and therefore delude us.”

“Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is an eternal uproar.”

“It quite often happens that the old man is subject to the delusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth, and from this experience he passes judgments on the work and course of his life, as if he had only now become clear-sighted; and yet the inspiration behind this feeling of well-being and these confident judgements is not wisdom, but weariness .”

“Many hammer all over the wall and believe that with each blow they hit the nail on the head.”

“Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.”

“We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie.” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”?”

“Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion.”

“One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.”

“Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.”

“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”

“[C]lass consciousness is not one of our national diseases; we suffer, indeed, from its opposite-the delusion that class barriers are not real. That delusion reveals itself in many forms, some of them as beautiful as a glass eye. One is the Liberal doctrine that a prairie demagogue promoted to the United States Senate will instantly show all the sagacity of a Metternich ... another is the doctrine that a moronrun through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will cease thereby to be a moron.”

“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

“A sense of humor always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion.”