Disillusion Quotes

#1. Being pretty successful, I can, of course, afford some luxuries. But I realize again and again how we have to disillusion ourselves of the idea that these things are going to give us real satisfaction.

Sam Keen

#2. measure up - disillusion us by showing

John Howard Griffin

#3. The danger of any new party at a time of disillusion with the old parties, is that it becomes all things to all men.

Shirley Williams

#4. Loneliness is just a passing disillusion we can conquer by acknowledging those around us.

Jenny Cutler Lopez

#5. Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet.

Orson Scott Card

#6. This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.

Gertrude Stein

#7. A time of darkness, despair, disillusion-so black only the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration

Sylvia Plath

#8. My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.

Harry Houdini

#9. In science, law is not a rule imposed from without, but an expression of an intrinsic process. The laws of the lawgiver are impotent beside the laws of human nature, as to his disillusion many a lawgiver has discovered.

Clifford Allbutt

#10. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

Naomi Wolf

#11. If all the days and nights in the world were to cease to be, I still hold that we were meant to meet and to love and to know the pain of violent disillusion.

Syrie James

#12. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

Kenneth Clark

#13. He seemed so old ... endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.

D.H. Lawrence

#14. The perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#15. A real relationship doesn't properly begin until the NRE burns away. That's when you have to start dealing with this person as an all-around human being, replete with irritating little habits. When disillusion sets in, love can begin.

Anthony D. Ravenscroft

#16. I promised myself that if ever I had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought disillusion.

W. Somerset Maugham

#17. Predilection, n. The preparatory stage of disillusion.

Ambrose Bierce

#18. My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.

Marilynne Robinson

#19. My first poem was a bolt from the blue ... it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy

William Carlos Williams

#20. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#21. Awakening is not a journey of discovering a distant land or a coveted secret, but rather, it is a journey of surrendering to what has always been present but shrouded in illusion and disillusion.

Shavasti

#22. Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to feel smug about," Charles Wallace said. "Why should I disillusion them?

Madeleine L'Engle

#23. It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.

Jacques Barzun

#24. Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.

T. S. Eliot

#25. This is the end of an epic tale, the story of my coming of age, which, like in the novels of the same description, went from wonder to ambition, from ambition to disillusion, and from disillusion to cynicism.

Muriel Barbery

#26. The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.

Alan Watts

#27. Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.

Anais Nin

#28. Disillusion is the last illusion.

Wallace Stevens

#29. There is tremendous relief in knowing His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me , so that no discovery can disillusion him about me , in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.

J.I. Packer

#30. All the Utopias - Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall - and their regulation end in scandal, feuds, poverty, griminess, disillusion.

Sinclair Lewis

#31. She had grown so accustomed to this exterior that she didn't always remember what truly lay underneath. Nor did she particularly want to. Why fester in disillusion, bewilderment, and anger when she could float above and pretend to be this sunny, charming girl instead?

Sherry Thomas

#32. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another
physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.

Toni Morrison

#33. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.

Miguel De Unamuno

#34. No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.

H.L. Mencken

#35. It was enough to disillusion a man, Red Philips remarked, if a man were silly enough to have illusions. Red

James Brady

#36. Everyone was searching for something, conducting lively arguments, getting excited, but behind it all one felt weariness, disillusion, emptiness.

Ilya Ehrenburg

#37. For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#38. Marriage and fatherhood heighten the disillusion that we all think we are born handy. We confidently believe that we can fix things around the house, as if it's part of the collective brain that was further enhanced by eighth-grade shop class.

Bob Newhart

#39. Our greatest illusion is disillusion. We imagine that we are disillusioned with life, when the truth is that we have not even begun to live.

Paul Brunton

#40. Disillusion in an ache that eats into the dreams of goodness, of love, of any value that matters - even to the very belief in life.

Anne Perry

#41. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

Sylvia Plath

#42. He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.

John Maynard Keynes

#43. Lost in this awful world, rubbing shoulders with the multitudes, I am like a tired man whose eye can't see behind him, in the deep years, anything but disillusion and bitterness, and in front of him, nothing but a storm which contains nothing new, neither learning nor pain.

Charles Baudelaire

#44. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#45. Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or "highway of despair," in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).

Kenny Smith

#46. I have made believe so long that now I am quite sincere in my conviction that we can see pretty much whatever we look for; which should prove the desirability of searching for amusement and profit rather than for boredom and disillusion.

Gelett Burgess

#47. Instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion.

May Sarton

#48. To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating.

Thomas Hardy

#49. What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism
can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?

R.D. Laing

#50. To my mind, 'Dear Brutus' stands halfway between Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 'Into the Woods'. Like them, it is a play about enchantment and disillusion, dreams and reality.

Michael Dirda

#51. Success - To rise from the illusion of pursuit to the disillusion of possession.

Elbert Hubbard

#52. In government you carry each hope; each disillusion. And in politics it's always about the next challenge.

Tony Blair

#53. An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#54. Hope is the only good thing that disillusion respects.

Luc De Clapiers

#55. Who has passed by the fates of disillusion has died twice.

Ouida

#56. Do you think I am standing here, making this up as I go? I am sorry to disillusion you. I am not Robin Williams. I am the king of the pen.

Mitch Hedberg

#57. It's all right to be disillusioned, but you can't be disillusioning.

Leslie Ford

#58. Illusions are hazardous, and so are disillusions.

Mason Cooley

#59. Sex, once a law as undisputed as gravity, has been disproved. The equation is erased, the blackboard broken

Isaac Marion

#60. But time brought healing,
Downsizing of ego,
And freedom from bondage.
Alas, neither damnation
Nor salvation
Would come -
No terror of some hellish fiend
Or apocalyptic fury
Upon his command.
There was nothing to fear,
And there was everything.

Kyrian Lyndon

#61. Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.

Hector Berlioz

#62. No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.

Thomas Ligotti

#63. (On getting married at 19)
We told ourselves we had forever and we never looked back. The problem was that we never really looked ahead.

Crystal Woods

#64. But he did not tell her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching; he was afraid, too, lest, disillusioned in the matter of art, she might at the same time be disillusioned in the greater matter of love.

Marcel Proust

#65. It appeared the more religious and older men got, the more insatiable their appetite grew for teenage hymens; a short sighted, selfish, entitled and wicked appetite at that by the kind of men who were disillusioned enough to believe that the world revolved around their poles.

Dauglas Dauglas

#66. Personal disillusionment accompanied by self-pity and self-loathing are the Achilles' heel of modern humankind, representing the weakness of the human spirit.

Kilroy J. Oldster