Delusions Quotes

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Insanity is everyone expecting you not to fall apart when you find out everything you believed in was a lie.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Most people are good and occasionally do something they know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn, as long as they don’t get caught. But evil is a completely different creature, Mac. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.”
― Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever

“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you never met, and to take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.”
― Doug Stanhope

“The doctor’s words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live.”
― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother

“Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”
― Tony Kushner, Millennium Approaches

“Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing.”
― John Cheever

“We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.”
― William Golding, Darkness Visible

“Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“The thing about memories wasn't that many of them inevitably faded, but that repeated recall of the ones you remembered burnished them into shining, gorgeous lies”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“Delusions are hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding insane people living in a backwards world.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities..”
― Christian Nestell Bovee

“Thinking no more about it, he stepped off into that cool space, that fast descent to her, with nothing in his mind but a memory of a curve of her shoulder, naked, as he had never seen it.”
― Patricia Highsmith, This Sweet Sickness

“The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.”
― A. E. Housman

“THE FIVE WAYS OF HIGH INTENSITY SELF-DECEPTION

So, since we postulate psychosis as a continuum of self-deception experiences, it is appropriate to distinguish the main channels that the effort of self-deception, when carried out in a superlative way, would use to materialize

a) Memory impairment
This would be the case of one who remembers more easily successes than their failures at one end of low-intensity self-deception, or who changes his entire biography adopting a false identity at the other end, and through different gradations of self-deception.

b) The alteration of the information from the 5 senses.
This would be the case of hallucinations.

c) Alteration of reasoning and logic.
Even being true, the information coming from the memory and the five senses, it is possible to process it so that it reaches conclusions that are away from the premises and thus achieve self-deception. An attenuated example of this would be known "bias" and a stronger then this would be the total distortion of logic and language.

d) Mysticism.
While respecting the information that comes from the five senses, memory, and without destroying logic or reasoning, self-deception could be carried out in superlative dimensions if you follow the path of mysticism. Here, the mechanism operates like believing in stories that, because they are mystical, take place beyond the perceptible and, therefore, do not contradict the information provided by the five senses.

e) Mixed.
The fifth way, which will be the most common, will be a mixture of all –or some– of the above, in different proportions. In the famous Schreber case, for example, a mystical-type story is seen, along with certain "bizarre" content in its composition”
― Martín Ross, THE SHIELD FEATS THEORY: a different hypothesis concerning the etiology of delusions and other disorders.

“Illusions cannot be condemned, despised, and persecuted save by those who are deluded and by those who believe that this world is or truly can be something, and something beautiful. An utterly crucial illusion, and so the half-philosopher combats illusions precisely because he is deluded; the true philosopher loves them and proclaims them because he is not deluded, and combating illusions in general is the surest sign of very imperfect and insufficient wisdom, and notable illusion.”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

“We found the truth within us and got rid of all the lies!" they said. "Let us stop with this particular delusion", he answered. "We nurture both the trees of truth and those of lies within us, whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not. We need the shadows of both to protect us well from sunburning.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“If you had never lived, and my mind was full of you--a fantasy figure with whom I am having an intense personal relationship--they'd give me treatment. They'd lock me up for being delusional. As it is, yes, it's an embarrassment.

The black-armband days were easier. It was a sign to say--I am a bit odd. Give me space. Give me time. Grief takes time.

I am grieving. I discover that grieving means living with someone who is no longer there.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Night Side of the River

“An expert is a man who doesn't make the slightest error on the road to the
Grand Illusion.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“The Real Me may actually have no obvious connection to the Me as it acts in the world and appears to others. It is a secret and beautiful garden only accessible only by means of psychology”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality

“बिम्ब छलते रहे,
मनमानी करते रहे.

विस्तृत होकर,
आवर्तित होकर.

कुहासे बढ़ते रहे.

इंद्रधनुषी छोर थे,
ओझल से होते रहे... !”
― Neelam Jain, Ek Anuja

“बिम्ब छलते रहे,
मनमानी करते रहे.
विस्तृत होकर,
आवर्तित होकर.
कुहासे बढ़ते रहे.
इंद्रधनुषी छोर थे,
ओझल से होते रहे... !”
― Neelam Jain, Ek Anuja

“The thought of Clara became a preoccupation, and with the love which at length he recongised there blended a sense of fate fulfilling itself. His enthusiasms, his purposes, never defined as education would have defined them, were dissipated into utter vagueness. He lost his guiding interests, and found himself returning to those of boyhood. The country once more attracted him; he took out of his old sketch-books, bought a new one, revived the regret that he could not be a painter of landscape. A visit to one or two picture-galleries, and then again profound discouragement, recognition of the fact that he was a mechanic and never could be anything else.
It was the end of his illusions. For him not even passionate love was to preserve the power od idealising its object. He loved Clara with all the desire of his being, but could no longer deceive himself in judging her character. The same sad clearness of vision affected his judgement of the world about him, of the activities in which he had once been zealous, of the conditions which enveloped his life and the lives of those dear to him. The spirit of revolt often enough stirred within him, but no longer found utterance in the speech which brings no relief; he did his best to dispel the mood, mocking at it as folly. Consciously he set himself that task of becoming a practical man, of learning to make the best of life as he found it, of shunning as the fatal error that habit of mind which kept John Hewett on the rack. Who was he that he should look for pleasant things in his course through the world? ‘We are the lower orders; we are the working classes,’ he said bitterly to his friend, and that seemed the final answer to all his aspirations.”
― George Gissing

“The United Kingdom is like a schizophrenic patient with delusions of grandeur.”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

“When I was little I broke both my ankles jumping off a roof because I was sure a cape would enable me to fly.
My parents attributed this to my strong imagination.
Last year my therapist called it a delusion.
I fail to see the difference.”
― Neil Hilborn, The Future

“The oasis is always over the next hill. And the next hill is always more of the same desert.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Antiquities