Top 100 Quotes About Disillusionment
#1. Are there people to aspire to? Can people be strong enough to withstand all of this disillusionment? Maybe the time is right for people to emerge from the easy cynicism and try to get back to a place where we can actually believe in people and trust people to have proper motivations.
Brendan Gleeson
#2. Pandora's Box could not be unopened, no one could return to Eden.
Selena Kitt
#4. If we come from good families where we have been supported well, there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the culture's values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to find out who we are.
Sam Keen
#5. Throughout the past century there has always existed a significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims. In fact, the number of biologists who have expressed some degree of disillusionment is practically endless.
Michael Denton
#6. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.)
Gustave Flaubert
#7. Torn between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus.
Emil Cioran
#8. Elisabeth had not had her future and her parents had not had theirs, there was nothing to this so-called future which was always promised to the young.
Ingeborg Bachmann
#9. it is only experience and disillusionment that make me cautious.
Martin Gilbert
#10. 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
#11. Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams.
Azar Nafisi
#12. We must help men and women see the epic in the ordinary details of life.
Matt Chandler
#13. In Latin America, specialists and polling organisations have, for some time, observed that the extension of formal democracy was accompanied by an increasing disillusionment about democracy and a lack of faith in democratic institutions.
Noam Chomsky
#14. In our world, to do what you want to do, you must first do what you have to do.
Anirudh Arun
#15. Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.
Bryant H. McGill
#16. False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.
Richard Dawkins
#17. They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.
Andrew Holleran
#19. We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#20. Disillusionment means having no more misconceptions, false impressions, and false judgments in life; it means being free from these deceptions. Refusing to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering of human life.
Oswald Chambers
#21. No perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.
Isaiah Berlin
#22. As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance.
Frank Herbert
#23. I am ashamed and deeply distressed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.
Wendell Berry
#24. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.
Henry Miller
#25. I became a communist because later on I was going to become a Christian.
Joy Davidman
#26. Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don't have it.
Andy Warhol
#27. Schopenhauer was right: Life has to be about disillusionment stumbling inexorably towards the totally fucked.
Irvine Welsh
#28. It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos.
Manly Hall
#29. Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality ... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
Dan Simmons
#30. But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne's face looked as she watched him - I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they'd understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly.
Emma Cline
#31. She'd stood by that creed. No softness, because the world wasn't soft; lots of laughter, because if you were in on the joke, the joke couldn't be on you; And no wanting what you couldn't take, because the world never gave.
Or so she'd thought.
Connie Brockway
#32. Sorrow binds us - I will always cherish you - my only disillusionment is unspoken words ...
John Geddes
#33. The experiences which drugs induce are as far removed from Reality as is a mirage, from water. No matter how much you pursue the mirage, you will never quench your thirst, and the search for Truth through drugs must end in disillusionment.
Meher Baba
#34. Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.
Bell Hooks
#35. Real leaders have to live a paradoxical life, where they must break the rules in order to maintain them. If your expectations are high, you're setting yourself up for disillusionment. The land of governance is paved with gray streets, not black or white ones.
Beau Willimon
#36. 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
#37. Disillusionment can come as fast as a gust, but building faith that the government won't inflate again is like building a new sailboat, a project of years.
Amity Shlaes
#38. Strike said "Huh" again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke.
Richard Price
#39. It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#40. I related to his disillusionment. Thinking that he was going for this big dream. Then he kind of saw through it all at one point and went back home. Then he started a bender, which I can relate to of course.
Woody Harrelson
#41. It was strange how these poems came to him nowadays, the distillation of his private emotions, of his disillusionment, of his solitude, of his yearning for a future in which, nevertheless, he could not believe.
Pearl S. Buck
#42. I have, despite all disillusionment, never, never allowed myself to feel like giving up. This is my message today; it is not worthy of a human being to give up.
Alva Myrdal
#43. There's no disillusionment like learning that forbidden fruit can be unpleasant.
Rae Foley
#44. If there were no illusions, there would bo no disillusionment. But then one would have no fond memories either, with which fortify oneself against the pain of the reality.
Mary Balogh
#45. On Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Sylvia's Lovers'.
'Philip Hepuburn worships Sylvia Robson, and finds dishonour' Sylvia Robson worships Charley Kinraid, and finds disillusionment. Charley Kinraid worships himself, and finds a career in the Royal Navy and an heiress who agrees with him.
Lucinda Elliot
#46. I guess love distorts our perception of reality, and it's even harder to recognize the truth when it's buried underneath layers of what we imagine relationships should be like.
Shannon Mullen
#47. How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.
Judy Garland
#48. I ... allowed my memory to journey back to the days when I was a boy of ten, full of health and optimism, when my wonder at the great game of living had yet to give way to disillusionment at its shabbiness.
Ruskin Bond
#49. The McGovern/McCarthy type candidacies have disappointed too many people, because of a disillusionment with the candidates themselves.
Hunter S. Thompson
#50. I am fairly optimistic about the disillusionment that produces homogeneity in general. The films that succeed in [theaters] are fairly homogeneous in terms of narrative and vision of the world.
Lucrecia Martel
#51. The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast.
H.W. Brands
#52. The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.
Bill Kristol
#53. I know how betrayal and disillusionment feel, when someone who could give you the world refuses even a tiny piece of it.
Mary Kubica
#54. Achievement is the death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.
Ambrose Bierce
#55. There is no disillusionment about India as far as I am concerned. There could never come a time when I would get disillusioned with my own country.
Dilip Kumar
#56. Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#58. No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.
Thomas Ligotti
#59. That disillusionment, moreover, like all other vogues, having had its beginning in the higher strata of society, had descended to the lower, where it was being worn threadbare, and that, now, those who were really and truly bored strove to conceal their misfortune as if it were a vice.
Mikhail Lermontov
#60. Every day we make the whole world new ... Or else grow old.
John Valentine
#61. All men are born with an equal and inalienable right to disillusionment. So, until they choose to waive that right, it's three cheers for Technological Progress and a College Education for everybody.
Aldous Huxley
#62. Nicholas wanted to believe in fairy tales. She'd read her share, hoping for miracles, but in the end, there was no hundred acre wood to play in with her little stuffed animals. There was pain and crushing disillusionment and betrayal.
Christine Feehan
#63. Nagging questions remain: Where is the line between making the most of one's potential and reaching for the unattainable? Where is the line between education as a tool and education as a kind of magic? The line is blurred and that is why when education fails, disillusionment is so bitter.
Henry Anatole Grunwald
#64. Do what you will, the heart hardens and the soul shrinks in upon itself.
Mikhail Lermontov
#65. One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.
Jodi Picoult
#66. Love is a disease of the youth; most of us go through it. A few are cured, the rest are disabled.
Martin Foreman
#67. Life is not a song, sweetling.
Someday you may learn that, to your sorrow.
George R R Martin
#68. We've tried calling sin "errors" or mistakes" or "poor judgment," but sin itself has stayed the same. No matter how we try to salve our conscience, we've known all along that men are still sinners; and the results of sin are still disease, disappointment, disillusionment, despair, and death.
Billy Graham
#69. Certainly, Gandhi is not inferior to Christ in goodness and sanctity, and he surpasses him in touching humility. Gandhi is the prophet of hope in this age of pessimism and disillusionment. He is a promise of sanity in the madness induced by our world's heedless drinking at the fount of war.
Sudhir Kakar
#70. Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#72. In freedom you form in utter disgrace,
the bars of my prison this night.
While you drift on currents of seraphim heights,
it is I who deserve to take flight.
Craig Froman
#73. Learn in good time to recognize disillusionment, so as to continue living your life according to the will of the Lord
Sunday Adelaja
#74. The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world.
Joseph Campbell
#75. What war did for him (hasten disillusionment with communism), childbirth did for me. I began to notice what neglected, neurotic waifs the children of Communists were and to question the genuineness of the love of mankind that didn't begin at home.
Joy Davidman
#76. Between the disillusionment that people feel about politics-as-usual, assaults on the right to vote, and the constant feelings of pressure that Americans suffer in our overworked, overstressed economy, too many people have checked out of the political process.
Annie Leonard
#77. A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.
Junot Diaz
#78. The bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price of disillusionment.
W. Somerset Maugham
#79. We remain in the Romantic cycle initiated by Rousseau: liberal idealism canceled by violence, barbarism, disillusionment and cynicism.
Camille Paglia
#80. Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.
Sol Luckman
#81. False optimism sooner or later means disillusionment, anger and hopelessness.
Abraham H. Maslow
#82. Cynicism is the besetting and venial fault of declining youth, and disillusionment its last illusion.
Francis Macdonald Cornford
#83. Though such authority and respect shouldn't be handed to all and sundry, have in caution's innermost room a confidant, a faithful mirror, whose correction you value when disillusionment is necessary.
Baltasar Gracian
#84. All these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust
Nathanael West
#85. In many instances, the failures of my greatest schemes ultimately lead to the fulfillment of my greatest successes. Therefore, God will allow our most cherished dreams to perish so that we might turn and seek out His most cherished plans.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#87. When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived.
Hilary Thayer Hamann
#88. The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don't want to go there.
Bart D. Ehrman
#89. I had sucked on the tit of disillusionment and teethed on the bitter root of cynicism. I was on the way to the misanthropy that would sour me.
Norman Lock
#90. The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?
E. M. Forster
#91. We have more than enough people to remind us of that, to give us dispassionate evaluations of our mediocrity.
Wendy Walker
#92. Disillusionment is the enemy of prosperity and well-being
Sunday Adelaja
#93. After you've seen behind the facade of a stage set you can't take the play seriously any more. You can't go backwards and regain your ignorance; you have to move forward.
Zeena Schreck
#94. All the troubles of the world, especially the spiritual, such as grief, impatience, disillusionment, despair, the truly basic troubles of man-they came about only because of the failure to view clearly the majesty of God.
Abraham Isaac Kook
#95. In some deep place in her heart, Caroline had kept alive the silly romantic notion that somehow David Henry had once known her as no one else ever could. But it was not true. He had never even glimpsed her.
Kim Edwards
#96. When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people's.
Tullian Tchividjian
#97. Our world is full of temporary promises and guile. It is necessarily so. We are not evil people, this is just how we survive. There are only a few steps that separate success from failure. Understand this and you will not suffer from disillusionment as often as I did.
Amy Tan
#98. I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.
Augustine Of Hippo
#99. Maybe it's stress or anger or adrenaline or disillusionment or a bullying nature or simple fear of getting killed themselves, but there is a problem if a cop cannot tell the difference between a menacing gangster and the far more common person they encounter whose life is a little frayed and messy.
David Horsey
#100. As an artist grows older, he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult, as he had when a child
Charles E. Burchfield
