Delusion Quotes - Page 27

• Confidence is 10 percent hard work and 90 percent delusion, just thinking foolishly that you will be able to do what you want to do

  Tina Fey

  Hard Work, Thinking, Want

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• This is what the government is, has always been, the creator and defender of privilege; the organization of oppression and revenge. To hope that it can ever become anything else is the vainest of delusions. They tell you that Anarchy, the dream of social order without government, is a wild fancy. The wildest dream that ever entered the heart of man is the dream that mankind can ever help itself through an appeal to law, or to come to any order that will not result in slavery wherein there is any excuse for government.

  Voltairine de Cleyre

  Dream, Revenge, Heart

  Eleventh of November 1887: Haymarket Memorial Speech by Voltairine de Cleyre, delivered in Chicago, contentdm.library.uvic.ca. 1901.

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• A certain degree of physical harmony and comfort is necessary, but above a certain level it becomes a hindrance instead of a help. Therefore the ideal of creating an unlimited number of wants and satisfying them seems to be a delusion and a snare.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Creating, Numbers, Comfort

  Mahatma Gandhi (1980). “All Men are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections”, p.98, A&C Black

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• For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself.

  Deepak Chopra

  Art, Men, Years

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• We must be holy without holiness. We must be whole, complete. That's being holy. Any other kind of holiness is false, a snare, and a delusion.

  Henry Miller

  Holiness, Kind, Holy

  Henry Miller (1963). “The Rosy Crucifixion”

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• Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of the multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper.

  Charles Mackay

  Pieces, Paper, Causes

  Charles Mackay (1852). “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, p.8

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• Unless we take care to clear the first principles of knowledge from the incumbrance and delusion of words, we may make infinite reasonings upon them to no purpose. We may deduce consequences, and never be the wiser.

  David Berman

  Principles, Purpose, Care

  David Berman (1997). “Berkeley”

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• Our whole system of banks is a violation of every honest principle of banks. There is no honest bank but a bank of deposit. A bank that issues paper at interest is a pickpocket or a robber. But the delusion will have its course. ... An aristocracy is growing out of them that will be as fatal as the feudal barons if unchecked in time.

  John Adams

  Issues, Principles, Aristocracy

  John Adams, Benjamin Rush (1892). “Old Family Letters: Copied from the Originals for Alexander Biddle... Series A-[B]”

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• An industrial system predicated on the delusion of limitless expansion will, in time, consume its own basis of support.

  Petra Kelly

  Support, Expansion, Limitless

  Petra Karin Kelly (1994). “Thinking green!: essays on environmentalism, feminism, and nonviolence”, Parallax Pr

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• If the idea of having to change ourselves makes us uncomfortable, we can remain as we are. We can choose rest over labour, entertainment over education, delusion over truth, and doubt over confidence. The choices are ours to make, but while we curse the effect, we continue to nourish the cause

  Jim Rohn

  Ideas, Choices, Doubt

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• Do mortal fools still measure the increments leading to their deaths, wagering pleasures against costs, persisting in the delusion that deeds have value, that the world and all the gods sit in judgment over every decision made or not made?

  Steven Erikson

  Decision, Cost, World

  "Toll the Hounds". Book by Steven Erikson, 2008.

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• When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy. When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song. When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest. When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king. When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one, thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Song, Kings, Heart

  Rabindranath Tagore (2005). “கீதாஞ்சலி: Kītāñcali”, p.83, Sura Books

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• Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Attitude, Reality, Tunnels

  Robert Anton Wilson (1977). “Cosmic trigger: final secret of the illuminati”, New Falcon Pubns

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• For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Hurt, Rage, Prelude

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• 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)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Psychotic, Talons, Term

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• If your going to have delusions, you might as well go for the really satisfying ones.

  J. Michael Straczynski

  Might, Wells, Satisfying

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• Vonnegut's war was necessary. And yet it was massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It was the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of men. In war, the sad tidy constructs we make to help us believe life is orderly and controllable are roughly thrown aside like the delusions they are. In war, love is outed as an insane, insupportable emotion, a kind of luxury emotion, because everywhere you look, someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, by someone whose own beloved has been slaughtered, or will be, or could be.

  George Saunders

  Confused, War, Believe

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• It is our destiny to live with the wrong as well as the right kind of citizens, and to learn from them, the wrong-minded ones, as much or more as from others. If we have not yet succeeded -after how many centuries?- in eliminating from life the elements which plague us perhaps we need to question life more closely. Perhaps our refusal to face reality is the only ill we suffer from, and all the rest but illusion and delusion. (p.26)

  Henry Miller

  Reality, Destiny, Suffering

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• With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.

  Carl Jung

  Art, Eye, Light

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• And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.

  Sylvia Plath

  Progress, Done, Something Better

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.141, Anchor

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• Since September it's just gotten colder and colder. There's less daylight now, I've noticed too. This can only mean one thing - the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice. Dad says the sun isn't going out. He says its colder because the earth's orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon. Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

  Bill Watterson

  Dad, Mean, Dark

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• Whatever, crazy chick who maybe lives here and maybe also breaks into Michael's house when they're all gone. I'm out. Have a nice delusion. -Shayne

  Rachel Caine

  Crazy, Nice, House

  Rachel Caine (2010). “Ghost Town: The Morganville Vampires”, p.218, Penguin

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• Let no Christian parents fall into the delusion that Sunday School is intended to ease them of their personal duties. The first and most natural condition of things is for Christian parents to train up their own children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Christian, Children, Fall

  Charles Spurgeon (2015). “Select Works”, p.343, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.

  Richard Dawkins

  Evil, Religion, Atheism

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.347, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.

  John Adams

  Religious, Mean, Would Be

  John Adams, Charles Francis Adams (1856). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.254

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