Delusion Quotes - Page 7

• Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

  Paul Watzlawick

  Reality, Ideas, Risk

  "How real is real?: Confusion, disinformation, communication".

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• From the viewpoint of absolute truth, what we feel and experience in our ordinary daily life is all delusion. Of all the various delusions, the sense of discrimination between oneself and others is the worst form, as it creates nothing but unpleasantness for both sides. If we can realize and meditate on ultimate truth, it will cleanse our impurities of mind and thus eradicate the sense of discrimination. This will help to create true love for one another. The search for ultimate truth is, therefore, vitally important.

  Dalai Lama

  Mind, Important, Ordinary

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• I support, defend, and admire prostitutes, gay or straight. They do important and necessary work, whether moralists of the Left and Right like it or not. Feminists who think they can abolish the sex trade are in a state of massive delusion. Only a ruthless, fascist regime of vast scale could eradicate the rogue sex impulse that is indistinguishable from the life force. Simply in the Western world, pagan sexuality has survived 2000 years of Judaeo-Christian persecution and is hardly going to be defeated by a few feminists whacking at it with their brooms.

  Camille Paglia

  Christian, Sex, Gay

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• The doctor will persist in laboring under the delusion that patients want common sense instead of magic.

  Rae Foley

  Doctors, Common Sense, Magic

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• For those who do not make the transition to a matured, more spiritual self-will reason will indeed be no more than rationalization. Here is a prodigious parallel: just as in antiquity the dysdaimonic personality could not appreciate how his mentality was bound in by his characterological (banausic, doulic) biases, so in modernity the facile or abstractivist rationalist cannot comprehend how his "rationality" merely slavishly subserves his appetites, delusions, preconceptions, ideologies, etc.

  Kenny Smith

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Self

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• Men, unlike mockingbirds, have the capacity for systematic self-delusion. We echo each other with equal precision, equal eloquence, equal assurance.

  Robert Ardrey

  Men, Echoes, Self

  Robert Ardrey (1966). “The Territorial Imperative”

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• As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion).

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Self, Majority

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• Should a reasonable person not demand that philosophy should not be foolishly purveyed before people incompetent to see the point of it, as pearls before swine? For Nietzsche is utterly correct: philosophy is only for the healthy and whole-minded, the sick it has always only made even sicker. By means of philosophy they dig themselves even deeper into their pathetic delusions.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Mean, People

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• I can't convince myself that it does much good to try to challenge the everyday political delusions and dementias of Americans at large. Their contained and confined mentalities by far prefer the petty and parochial prisons of the kind of sense they have been trained and rewarded for making out of their lives (and are punished for deviating from them). What it costs them ultimately to be such slaves and infants and ideological zombies is a thought too monstrous and rending and spiky for them even to want to glance at.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Political, Challenges

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• De Morgan was explaining to an actuary what was the chance that a certain proportion of some group of people would at the end of a given time be alive; and quoted the actuarial formula, involving p [pi], which, in answer to a question, he explained stood for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. His acquaintance, who had so far listened to the explanation with interest, interrupted him and exclaimed, 'My dear friend, that must be a delusion, what can a circle have to do with the number of people alive at a given time?'

  W. W. Rouse Ball

  Death, Science, Circles

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• Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would listen to music. When I switched to a career as a writer, I would try to listen to music, but if the songs had lyrics they would get in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I switched to listening to purely instrumental pieces.

  Alan Moore

  Song, Writing, Careers

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• Love is at first a set of delusions, which, as time goes by, are discarded like training wheels, and you love truly.

  Robert Breault

  Love Is, Training, Firsts

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• Some are masters of illusions, some are ministers of trade, all under the same delusion, all their beds unmade.

  Bob Dylan

  Art, Media, Bed

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• Self-confidence should be applied to wholesome actions,
  Overcoming of delusions and my ability to overcome them.
  Thinking, 'I alone shall do it'
  Is the self-confidence of action.

  Shantideva

  Self Esteem, Self Confidence, Thinking

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• The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.

  Theodor Adorno

  Joy, Culture, Conflict

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.206, Verso

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• The military superiority of Europe to Asia is not an eternal law of nature, as we are tempted to think, and our superiority in civilization is a mere delusion.

  Bertrand Russell

  Military, Thinking, Europe

  Bertrand Russell (2007). “The Problem of China”, p.27, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Misfortune occurs or can occur to anyone, of any sort of character. The eudaimonic has more resources to avoid it (being in autonomous control of his appetites and assumptions) and more resources to deal with it if it occurs (being better able to put it in perspective and maintain his own evenness of self-mastery). Tragedy as a dramatic form is meant to foster the ethos of sophrosyne or moderation, "nothing to excess"; it nurtures a sense of distance from the dominant illusions and delusions that may infect even aristoi.

  Kenny Smith

  Distance, Philosophy, Character

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• The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run, these are the only people who count.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Running, Thinking, Self

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• When I was 24, I was full of life. I was that ham who wanted to be famous, a movie star, all that stuff. I think it's cool. But it was not what I was searching for, really. It was more a delusion.

  Jean-Claude Van Damme

  Stars, Thinking, Ham

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• Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Success, Destiny, Giving

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2009). “The Crack-Up”, p.89, New Directions Publishing

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• Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people; they fix too for the people the principles of their political creed.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Passion, People, Political

  Thomas Jefferson (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence, contin”, p.441

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• We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.

  Sigmund Freud

  Hysteria, Artistic Creation, May

  Sigmund Freud (2009). “Totem and Taboo”, p.96, Cosimo, Inc.

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• A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.

  H. L. Mencken

  Mother, Men, Self

  H. L. Mencken (2015). “In Defense of Women: Human Sexuality”, p.7, 谷月社

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• [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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Real, Eye

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• One of the most interesting and harmful delusions to which men and nations can be subjected is that of imagining themselves special instruments of the Divine Will.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Interesting, Ego

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Unpopular Essays”, p.146, Routledge

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