Delusion Quotes - Page 6

• I'm so incredibly tired of giving respect to a lot of delusions and crazy ideas just because they are regarded as religions.

  Bjorn Ulvaeus

  Respect, Crazy, Tired

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The ends do not justify the means. If our actions will bring harm to others, even in the service of some 'good,' they are almost certainly deluded. If our actions do not come from a kind heart, from loving courage and compassion, they are deluded. If they are based on a distinction between 'us' and 'them,' they stem from delusion. Only to the extent that we act from the wisdom of no separation, understanding how we are woven together, will our intention bring benefit.

  Jack Kornfield

  Heart, Mean, Compassion

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• Delusion means mortality. And awareness means Buddhahood.

  Bodhidharma

  Mean, Awareness, Mortality

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.51, Macmillan

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• Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Crush, Competition, Advancement

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• [The political mind] is a strange mixture of vanity and timidity, of an obsequious attitude at one time and a delusion of grandeurat another time. The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Attitude, Men, Vanity

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• Human beings never think for themselves. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

  Michael Crichton

  Fear, Thinking, Self

  "The Lost World". Book by Michael Crichton, 1995.

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• Modern civilization is largely devoted to the pursuit of the cult of delusion. There is no general information about the nature of mind. It is hardly ever written about by writers or intellectuals; modern philosophers do not speak of it directly; the majority of scientists deny it could possibly be there at all. It plays no part in popular culture: no one sings about it, no one talks about it in plays, and it's not on TV. We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.

  Sogyal Rinpoche

  Real, Believe, Buddhism

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• Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage.

  Karl Bowman

  Love, Obsessive, Love Is

  "The Subtlety of Emotions". Book by Aaron Ben-Ze'ev (p. 445), 2001.

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• As long as civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Laughter, Wine, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.253, Penguin

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• It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Stupid, Long, Pessimistic

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• The Truth doesn't need your cooperation to exist. All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion do require your participation in order to exist. I've looked into marginal areas of human experience -historical and otherwise- with a rational mind, and what I've found is that doorways into the miraculous are far fewer than the publicists of the New Age would have us believe. On the other hand, they are not as rare as the proponents of radical reductionism and materialism would have us believe. There are doorways out of the mundane.

  Terence McKenna

  Believe, Hands, Order

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• Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time. Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Practice, Needs, Defense

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• It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. A handsome woman talks nonsense, you listen and hear not nonsense but cleverness. She says and does horrid things, and you see only charm. And if a handsome woman does not say stupid or horrid things, you at once persuade yourself that she is wonderfully clever and moral.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Clever, Stupid, Doe

  Leo Tolstoy (1998). “The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories”, p.100, Oxford University Press, USA

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• You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes.

  Alasdair Gray

  Thinking, Talking, Leader

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• An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
  It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
  It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
  It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

  Adrienne Rich

  Love, Self, Two

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.104, W. W. Norton & Company

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• You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.

  Terence McKenna

  Religious, Clothes, Prejudice

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• Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.

  John Dos Passos

  Art, Block, Past

  John Dos Passos (1964). “Occasions and protests”

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• Their [the new atheists] treatment of the religious viewpoint is pathetic to the point of non-being. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing.

  Michael Ruse

  Religious, Atheist, Philosophy

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• It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.

  H. L. Mencken

  Teaching, Men, Thinking

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.316, Vintage

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• We labor under the fatal delusion that no disease can be cured without medicine. This has been responsible for more mischief to mankind than any other evil. ...Disease increases in proportion to the increase to the number of doctors in a place.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Dark, Doctors, Medicine

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• [T]here's a difference between confident leadership and empty-headed delusion or cheerleading. And this is a difference that many CEOs miss.

  Henry Blodget

  Cheerleading, Differences, Missing

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• What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager school children, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be decieved? -"On Beauty and Falsehood," The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire

  Lauren Oliver

  Children, Philosophy, Eye

  Lauren Oliver (2015). “Delirium Trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, Requiem”, p.267, Hachette UK

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• As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.

  Alfred Korzybski

  Faith, Believe, Gambling

  Alfred Korzybski (1958). “Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics”, p.697, Institute of GS

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• The real enemy of happiness is the mind's fixations and delusions... If you have the right mind, you can overcome anything - you can be happy, no matter what.

  Dalai Lama

  Real, Mind, Enemy

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• Human life is so full of pain, that once past the youthful delusion that a sad countenance is interesting, and an incurable woe the most delightful thing possible, the mind instinctively turns where it can get rest, and cheer and sunshine. And the friend who can bring to it the largest portion of these is, of a natural necessity, the most useful, the most welcome, and the most dear.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Cheer, Pain, Real

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