Delusion Quotes - Page 21

• For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.

  John Carroll

  Goal, Desire, Ants

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• Rock stardom is hard work and it takes a team to make it happen. Also, communication is important because too often inexperienced artists have delusions of what a label is supposed to do for them. The truth is, being in the record business is hard work and requires focus and calculated moves to achieve success.

  David Ellefson

  Team, Moving, Communication

  Source: www.alternativenation.net

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• You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn

  Life, Strong, Attachment

  Jon Kabat-Zinn (2005). “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life”, Hyperion

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• 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

  Atheist, Thinking, Long

  Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.307, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Life was dense, dark, ancient. They watched Dean, serious and insane at his raving wheel, with eyes of hawks. All had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it.

  Jack Kerouac

  Sadness, Eye, Dark

  "On the Road".

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• The whole idea of civilization as an understandable narrative is a bit nuts. It's the most problematic of delusions.

  Carey Mercer

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.

  Derrick Jensen

  Police, Green, Purpose

  Derrick Jensen (2011). “Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization”, p.176, Seven Stories Press

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• There are many kinds of delusion.

  Michael Ende

  Kind

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• The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to trurh.

  Scott Adams

  Mind, Window, Humans

  Scott Adams (2013). “God's Debris: A Thought Experiment”, p.57, Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC

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• They say that Hope is happiness But genuine Love must prize the past; And Mem'ry wakes the thoughts that bless: They rose first -- they set the last. And all that mem'ry loves the most Was once our only hope to be: And all that hope adored and lost Hath melted into memory. Alas! It is delusion all-- The future cheats us from afar: Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are.

  Lord Byron

  Memories, Past, Thinking

  George Gordon Byron, “Stanzas For Music: They Say That Hope Is Happiness”

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• Providence has so ordained it, that only two women have a true interest in the happiness of a man--his own mother, and the mother of his children. Besides these two legitimate kinds of love, there is nothing between the two creatures except vain excitement, painful and vain delusion.

  Octave Feuillet

  Love, Mother, Children

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• The radicals...want speech regulated by codes that proscribe certain language. They see free speech as at best a delusion, at worst a threat to the welfare of minorities and women....The most obvious (and cynical) explanation for the switched positions is the switched situations. Protesting students became established professors and administrators. For outsiders, free speech is bread and butter; for insiders, indigestion. To the new academics, unregulated free speech spells trouble.

  Russell Jacoby

  Cynical, Want, Outsiders

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• The aging process is totally minimizing. Life in general is pretty minimizing because you have a lot of big ideas, and you have to battle the mistaken delusions and instability that come with youth.

  Natasha Lyonne

  Ideas, Battle, Youth

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• What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world - that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

  Richard Lindzen

  Powerful, Special, World

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• I was naïve when I was young, I was sheltered. I had illusions about who I was going to be, delusions, and a little bit of pretentiousness. And I thought, "I'll write the guy like that. It'll allow me to make fun of everyone else if I make fun of myself."

  Greg Mottola

  Fun, Writing, Guy

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• Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.

  Henry David Thoreau

  New York, Philosophy, Mistake

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• We should reflect on the idea that since the beginning of time sentient beings have been mentally unstable because they have been slaves of delusion, they lack the eye of wisdom to see the path leading to nirvana and enlightenment, and they lack the necessary guidance of a spiritual teacher. Moment by moment they are indulging in negative actions, which will eventually bring about their downfall.

  Dalai Lama

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Teacher

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• No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Men, Goats, Matter

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “The Rum Diary: Film Tie-in Edition”, p.140, A&C Black

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• I don't pretend to any exemption from the general lot of parental delusion-I mean that like most other parents I see my child through an atmosphere which illuminates, magnifies, and at the same time refines the object to a degree that amounts to a delusion.

  Sara Coleridge

  Children, Mean, Parent

  Sara Coleridge Coleridge (1874). “Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge”, p.70

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• Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Real, Book, Character

  Louisa May Alcott (2018). “Louisa May Alcott Collection”, p.1224, Youcanprint

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• Change that does not lead to liberation from fear, greed and delusion is not wholesome.  Furthermore, any change that does not yield more compassion and loving-kindness for yourself and others is a waste of precious life energy.

  Phillip Moffitt

  Kindness, Compassion, Yield

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• No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Reason, Democratic

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.353, Vintage

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• Pride is a mental factor causing us to feel higher or superior to others. Even our study of dharma can be the occasion for the delusion of pride to arise if we think our understanding is superior to that of everyone else. Pride is harmful because it prevents us from accepting fresh knowledge from a qualified teacher. Just as a pool of water cannot collect on the tip of a mountain, so too a reservoir of understanding cannot be established in a mind falsely elevated by pride.

  Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

  Teacher, Pride, Thinking

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• In exalting the faculties of the soul, we annihilate, in a great degree, the delusion of the senses.

  Aime Martin

  Education, Soul, Degrees

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• My delusion outweighs my talent by far and it always will, because if it doesn't, then there's no point in living.

  Willis Earl Beal

  Talent, No Point, Ifs

  Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. September 20, 2013.

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