Deluded People Quotes & Sayings

What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. it was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup. — Philip Roth

Menestheus, the son of Peteus, grandson of Orneus, and the great-grandson to Erechtheus, the first man that is recorded to have affected popularity and ingratiated himself with the multitude, stirred up and exasperated the most eminent men of the city, who had long borne a secret grudge to Theseus, conceiving that he had robbed them of their several little kingdoms and lordships, and, having pent them all up in one city, was using them as his subjects and slaves. He put also the meaner people into commotion, telling them, that, deluded with a mere dream of liberty, though indeed they were deprived both of that and of their proper homes and religious usages, instead of many good and gracious kings of their own, they had given themselves up to be lorded over by a new-comer and a stranger. — Plutarch

Herein lies a riddle: How can a people so gifted by God become so seduced by naked power, so greedy for money, so addicted to violence, so slavish before mediocre and treacherous leadership, so paranoid, deluded, lunatic? — Philip Berrigan

Her reason might have collapsed by now, of course, nothing like a few days of people telling you that you are mad and deluded when you know that you are telling the truth to turn the brain. — Kerry Greenwood

People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something-always, in a word, seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons. All phenomena are empty. They contain nothing worth desiring. — Bodhidharma

My faceless neighbor spoke up:
"Don't be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve."
I exploded:
"What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?
His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:
"I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people. — Elie Wiesel

We believe in a society in delusion, and if you're awake and not deluded people tell you you're mad. That's why I'm a freak and they're not. But I'm actually not. — Billy Childish

To know how little one knows is to have genuine knowledge. Not to know how little one knows is to be deluded. Only those who know when they are deluded can free themselves from such delusion. The intelligent people are not deluded, because they know and accept their ignorance as ignorance, and thereby have genuine knowledge. — Laozi

It's not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria - to believe that most of what's in the financial news is wrong, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded - without being insane. — Michael Lewis

[M]any believe that by being honest and open they are winning people's hearts and showing their good nature.They are greatly deluded. Honesty is actually a blunt instrument, which bloodies more than it cuts. Your honesty is likely to offend people; it is much more prudent to tailor your words, telling people what they want to hear rather than the coarse and ugly truth of what you feel or think. More important, by being unabashedly open you make yourself so predictable and familiar that it is almost impossible to respect or fear you, and power will not accrue to a person who cannot inspire such emotions. — Robert Greene

The New Atheists believe that science replaces the claims about the world that religion makes - and therefore makes religion redundant. Some of them think that a whole new moral system should be based on science. That's sounding more and more like religion itself to me. But the other unsettling way in which Humanism imitates religion - and perhaps the most notable one in the case of the New Atheists - is its claim that people who do not share its beliefs are not only mistaken but also deluded and perhaps even evil. The line I quoted above about opposition to evolution being a sign of insanity and possibly wickedness comes, of course, from Richard Dawkins.
[Curb your enthusiasm] — Michael Ruse

Fear not, the people may be deluded for a moment, but cannot be corrupted. — Andrew Jackson

So what motivates people to work hard every day to do things that will satisfy the economy's needs but not their own? Like so many thinkers, Smith believed that people want just one thing - happiness - hence economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy.14 If and only if people hold this false belief will they do enough producing, procuring, and consuming to sustain their economies. — Daniel M. Gilbert

When your life is always a part of your surroundings - in other words, when you are called back to yourself, in the present moment - then there is no problem. When you start to wander about in some delusion which is something apart from you yourself, then your surroundings are not real anymore, and your mind is not real anymore. If you yourself are deluded, then your surroundings are also a misty, foggy delusion. Once you are in the midst of delusion, there is no end to delusion. You will be involved in deluded ideas one after another. Most people live in delusion, involved in their problem, trying to solve their problem. But just to live is actually to live in problems. And to solve the problem is to be a part of it, to be one with it. So — Shunryu Suzuki

It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll
then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. — Zadie Smith

Faith is a device of self-delusion, a sleight of hand done with words and emotions founded on any irrational notion that can be dreamed up. Faith is the attempt to coerce truth to surrender to whim. In simple terms, it is trying to breath life into a lie by trying to outshine reality with the beauty of wishes. Faith is the refuge of fools, the ignorant, and the deluded,not of thinking rational people. — Terry Goodkind

As for my destination, I don't think I ever knew one. I walk, I run, in the direction of my dreams. Things change along the way, people change, I change, the world changes, even my dreams change. I don't have a place to arrive, I just keep doing what I know how to do the best that I can do it. I'll probably end up a deluded geriatric in a wheelchair wearing a cape and tights, imagining my own flight out of this world, but of course with a young girl in my arms. — Shahrukh Khan

Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite as well as those equipped with narrow, specialized vocational skills, know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don't expect them to save us. They do not even know how to ask the questions, And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implode and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded, as the rest of us. — Chris Hedges

They tried to substitute for Christianity a body of dogmas called "dialectical materialism." As Orestes Brownson pointed out in 1849, and as Arnold Toynbee has also written, communism was really a kind of caricature of Christianity, borrowing certain of its moral affirmations, imitating its dogmas, and even appropriating some of its phrases. This made communism all the more dangerous: for the superficial similarities between Christian morality and the pretended Soviet morality sometimes deluded Americans and people in other free states into thinking that communism had high moral aspirations. — Russell Kirk

Students today want to know about the devil, about witchcraft, about the occult. Many people do not know they are turning to Satan. They are being deluded. — Billy Graham

The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it. — Andrew Jackson

That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup. It was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinity. — Philip Roth

Truth (according to Edward Willing): People who rely on first sight are either lazy or deluded. — Melissa Jensen

So what needs to be done is to spread the idea that anxiety is inappropriate. It's sort of like we who are psychedelic have to function as sitters for society, because society is going to thrash, and resist, and think it's dying, and be deluded, and regurgitate unconscious material, and so forth and so on. And the role then, I think, for psychedelic people is to try and spread calm. — Terence McKenna

I'm not deluded enough to think that everyone who knows my name is a listener. You know, I hope that part of that interest - part of that public interest - has to do with me still making records that people like. — John Mayer

Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other's favour. That's what love is, isn't it? — David Mitchell

You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact. — Steven Levitt

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded. — Will Self

I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus. — Faye Wattleton

People don't want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you're a teacher you're in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they're old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don't actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch. — Nick Harkaway

Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot. — E.A. Bucchianeri

I was surrounded by nature and trying to come to terms with this blissful nature versus the inhumane mentality of war. People were being deluded by someone using the word peace. — Thurston Moore

The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. — Henry A. Wallace

We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, "You let me know when you want to stop." All-out treatment, we tell the incurably ill, is a train you can get off at any time - just say when. But for most patients and their families we are asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come - and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want. — Atul Gawande

And yet some people actually imagine that the revelation in God's Word is not enough to meet our needs. They think that God from time to time carries on an actual conversation with them, chatting with them, satisfying their doubts, testifying to His love for them, promising them support and blessings. As a result, their emotions soar; they are full of bubbling joy that is mixed with self-confidence and a high opinion of themselves. The foundation for these feelings, however, does not lie within the Bible itself, but instead rests on the sudden creations of their imaginations. These people are clearly deluded. God's Word is for all of us and each of us; He does not need to give particular messages to particular people. — Jonathan Edwards

If I didn't fear I'd do you harm...I'd try to make you an atheist. I really do think that you are a deluded follower of mistaken and superstitious and cowardly theories. That's as far as I'll go....Everyone who worships a god worships a force back of all nature, no matter what they call him or it and even if they call his aspects by different names & have many "gods." If there really is such a force, then all people who worship any god or gods, worship the same god. I'd just as soon call him Ishtar or Baal or Jehovah. They're merely names for the same idea. (Letter from Simpson to Anne Roe, written ca. 1920-21, when Anne was briefly flirting with fundamentalist Christianity, American Philosophical Society archives.) — George Gaylord Simpson

The greatest miracle was that in the end I could actually feel pity for those men because they were so deluded: they thought they had power and really they had nothing. I will never forget it. And from that moment on I've never really hated anymore. It all turned around when I sat there thinking what poor empty souls they were. — Diet Eman

So try not to see something in particular; try not to achieve anything special. You already have everything in your own pure quality. If you understand this ultimate fact, there is no fear. There may be some difficulty, of course, but there is no fear. If people have difficulty without being aware of the difficulty, that is true difficulty. They may appear very confident, they may think they are making a big effort in the right direction, but without knowing it, what they do comes out of fear. Something may vanish for them. But if your effort is in the right direction, then there is no fear of losing anything. Even if it is in the wrong direction, if you are aware of that, you will not be deluded. There is nothing to lose. There is only the constant pure quality of right practice. — Shunryu Suzuki

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

What are the present governments of Europe, but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its own inhabitants say, It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic, at the expense of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced. — Thomas Paine

But deluded people don't realize that their own mind is the Buddha. They keep searching outside. — Bodhidharma

Don't be concerned with other people's impressions of you. They are dazzled and deluded by appearances. Stick with your purpose. This alone will strengthen your will and give your life coherence. — Epictetus

Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality. — Eugene Ionesco

Crazy people always think they're perfectly sane. It's what makes them so crazy; their entire delusion lies within the fact that they believe they aren't deluded. — Nenia Campbell

Once the people have been deluded into believing that speeches and voting are the only acceptable tools by which to affect change in their nation, those who are in control no longer need to worry about any significant challenge to their power. — Dave Champion

Our nature is the mind. and the mind is our nature.this nature is the same as the mind of all buddhas. buddhas of the past and future only transmit this mind. beyond this mind there's no buddha anywhere.but deluded people don't realize that their own mind is the buddha.they keep searching outside.they never stop invoking buddhas or worshipping buddhas and wondering where is the buddha? don't indulge in such illusions. just know your mind. beyond your mind there's no other buddha.the sutras say, "everything that has form is an illusion."they also say, "wherever you are, there's a buddha." your mind is the buddha. don't use a buddha to worship a buddha. — Bodhidharma