Delusion Quotes

“So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?” the answer, at the most basic level, isn’t “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.” No, at the most basic level the answer is “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.” Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don’t. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.”
― Robert Wright , Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“One must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“They retained only the faintest recollection of what they had lost and had no desire to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They derided the mere possibility of this former felicity of theirs and termed it a day-dream. They could not even picture it to themselves in images and forms, but strange and wondrous to relate, having lost any credence in their former happiness, calling it a fairy tale, they so longed to be innocent and happy once more, all over again that, childlike, they fell down before this, their heart's desire, deified it, built temples, and began to worship their own idea, their own 'desire', and tearfully bowed before it in adoration, while at the same time utterly discounting its feasibility or the possibility of its realization. However, had it ever become possible for them to return to the state of happy innocence they had lost, and if someone could have shown it to them again and asked if they wanted to return to it, they would certainly have refused.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“Now it is all clear, and as plain as a pikestaff. Formerly—I don't know why—everything seemed veiled in a kind of mist. That is, I believe, because people think that the human brain is in the head. Nothing of the sort; it is carried by the wind from the Caspian Sea.”
― Nikolai Gogol, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories

“SHOHAKU OKUMURA ~ If we feel we’re becoming enlightened, that’s delusion.”
― Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“There are stages in the business of serious life in which to assume is cruel, but to deceive is to destroy; and it is of little consequence, in the conclusion, whether men deceive themselves, or submit, by a kind of mutual consent, to the impositions of each other.”
― Thomas Paine, The Crisis

“That the self advances and confirms the myriad things is called delusion. That the myriad things advance and confirm the self is enlightenment.”
― Dogen Zenji

“Love is the first and most devious deceiver, the most seductive delusion.”
― J. Earp

“The various aspects of illusion described so far refer to a single function, a single structure, a single failure. The function is to protect from the real; the structure does not involve refusing to perceive the real but, rather, splitting it in two; the failure lies in recognizing the protective double too late as the very reality from which one thought one had found protection. This is the curse of evasion: by way of a phantasmatic duplication, it sends us back to the undesirable starting point, the real. We can see now why evasion is always a mistake: it is always inoperative, because the real is always right. We may, admittedly, try to protect ourselves from a future event, if that happens to be possible; we shall never protect ourselves from a past or present event or one that is 'certain to come to pass,' as in the oracular symbolics which announces in advance an ineluctable necessity that already has all the characteristics of a present necessity. And the act by which one attempts to slough off that necessity will never be able to 'do any better' than literally reproduce the feared even or, even more exactly, constitute that event. This is what happens to Oedipus, as it happens to everyone at odds with himself - that is to say, to everyone at some point or other of his existence.”
― Clément Rosset, Le réel et son double

“Some people seem to have a vested interest in their delusion. - On Delusion”
― Lamine Pearlheart, To Life from the Shadows

“Delusions are the rafters of reality.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Mass delusions bear consequences.
They lead to mass graves.”
― A.J. Deus, Holy Enemies of Freedom: How Martin Luther Unleashed the Beast of Anti-Semitism

“The kind of love I seek is a folie a deux.”
― J. Andrew Schrecker, Insomniacs, We

“Confusion is like a delusion, it's like dust covering the mirror of your real potentials and identity followed by your true belief system by turning it out into negative one which makes your self-image blur so you feel low and dull to perform anything bigger, somehow it kills the fruits of all your efforts unexpectedly, it has an ability to blow the flame of your passion..... there are a lot of sources you will find around, stay away from anyone who makes you confuse, anything, person, ideology or belief any source that makes you feel like that, stay away from it, leave it and live your real life.”
– Mohsin Ali Shauk”
― Mohsin Ali Shaukat

“Delusion is what your society wants to believe in, reality is what you see from your heart!”
― Fahad Basheer

“A million poems, all written in the loss and seeking of love that deludes us.”
― Meeta Ahluwalia

“What is the essential difference between banknotes, coins, and chicken shit? None.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“And what is love anyway? Love's all over the mountain where the beautiful go to die no doubt, but I cannot attach much meaning to your idea of such a long-lasting love for someone you lost sight of so long ago. Perhaps it's something you've invented now.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking?

Which is why I am so afraid to speak to Dr. Grene, lest I give him only imaginings.

Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Мы присним ему счастливую жизнь. Лучше так, чем оставить его в суровой темноте.”
― Ilze Falb, Un rêve heureux

“Delusion is what your society wants you to believe in, reality is what you see from your heart!”
― Fahad Basheer

“The biggest delusion of human is when he declares he has learnt, and the realization of that very delusion is when he corrects and says that, " Yes, he is still learning"!”
― Yash Thakur

“I am the default woman who was never noted as special. I'm the tolerant one that he's blessed to have. Im not the Apple of anyone's eye. I'm not the one longed for or the one that is dreamed about. I am the woman that sticks around and gives her all. Im not the woman that he's always wanted. I remember writing a song for him and he blew it off. I remember trying to spoil him and he barely reacted.. I remember feeling foolish for him and he quickly became comfortable and then I was just "the wife". I remember being told that "I cheated him" as if I deliberately decieved him and little did I know I was the one who was being deceived. I was being looked down on. I would never compare. I was not good enough in the eyes of him, her or the family. I remember trying to motivate only to be blamed for being part of the reason for poor family ties. I remember having to stand up for myself. I remember giving birth multiple times only to feel afterwards that maybe he wished it had been someone else baring his children. Ive read oh God what you think of me. I'm losing the battle in my mind. How many times will I take up arms in this battle only to find myself dying to sleep and waking up to fight it all over again. This woman will not die and the fight is not changing. It's like a self defeat life loop of my reincarnated self. Just thinking.”
― VaeEshia Ratcliff-Davis

“I lose the grip of time when I search for its delusional existence.”
― Yash Thakur

“Words of an old soul's heart,
Portrayal of the matrix art
To break from the illusion
Of your continuous delusion

No chapter good or bad,
Not happy, neither sad.
Attachement to desire,
The heart sparks inner fire.”
― Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache

“Some of the things we fear exist nowhere but where fear happens.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“One envisions the reality, vitality, and credence through the transform of delusions, and delusion is not the collapse or deficiency. It just displays an excessive load of the perception and intuition.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Keep repeating the exercise of grief and it loses meaning, it becomes rote, false, a game of self-delusion, self-indulgence. A way of never getting over anything, ever.”
― Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

“Delima

I never knew this, but today i know how it feels when you try to hold on to some situation, some feelings, some people, in fact everything because you couldn't not be better without those things, people or feelings. But you can't because the more you try to hold them the more quickly they slip away from your hands. And the only choices you have is to either let them go slowly or to enjoy the rest of it i.e; nothing. And people say life goes on.

Ratish Edwards”
― Ratish Edwards

“They seem to think that the terrific forces they had helped to unloose could be controlled (and composed), when it came to the making of peace, with a few kind words - that is, the mood of the world was going to change overnight from the long, strange, belligerent obscurantism to a clear, sweetly rational, cooperative spirit, without rancor, without revenge even in the hearts of the humiliated, without a memory of the months and months of life under the shadow of death.... Good-will, so they seemed to be saying, could be invoked by almost a wave of the hand....”
― Harold Edmund Stearns