Disillusion Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Sex, once a law as undisputed as gravity, has been disproved. The equation is erased, the blackboard broken — Isaac Marion

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

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

Success - To rise from the illusion of pursuit to the disillusion of possession. — Elbert Hubbard

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

He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen. — John Maynard Keynes

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

In my opinion it is a grand book ... Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement ... What we need therefore, in my opinion, is not a change in our economic programmes, which would only lead in practice to disillusion with the results of your philosophy; but perhaps even the contrary, namely, an enlargement of them. Your greatest danger is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the United States. — John Maynard Keynes

For radical white writers wishing to forge interracial movements of poor and working people, whiteness has also long been a problem, with Alexander Saxton and Ted Allen making especially full efforts to understand whiteness in order to disillusion whites unable to see past the value of their own skins. — David Roediger

But how will I know who my Soulmate is?" Brida felt that this was one of the most important questions she had ever asked in her life.
By taking risks' she said to Brida. ' By risking failure, disappointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in you search for Love. As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end. — Paulo Coelho

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion. — Miguel De Unamuno

The Don Juan of knowledge: he has yet to be discovered by any philosopher or poet. He is lacking in love for the things he comes to know, but he has intellect, titillation, and pleasure in the hunt and intrigues involved in coming to know--all the way up to the highest and most distant planets of knowledge--until finally nothing remains for him to hunt down other than what is absolutely painful in knowledge, like the drunkard who ends up drinking absinthe and acqua fortis. Thus he ends up lusting for hell--it is the last knowledge that seduces him. Perhaps, like everything he has come to know, it will disillusion him as well! And then he would have to stand still for all of eternity, nailed on the spot to disillusionment, and himself having become the stone guest longing for an evening meal of knowledge that he never again will receive!--For the entire world of things no longer has a single morsel to offer this hungry man. — Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

Hope is the only good thing that disillusion respects. — Luc De Clapiers

It is impossible for me to be an Anarchist, for I do not believe in the essential goodness of man. The world, the physical world, that was once all in all to me, has at moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer at such moments make up to me at all for the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

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

But the true evil of drink lies in the disillusion: that the initial pleasure very soon evaporates, leaving a demoralizing craving for more, which is not even temporarily pleasurable. Which then leads to deterioration of the faculties of both body and mind; plus a bewildering lack of co-operation between the two. — Caitlin Thomas

For sex to be wholly satisfying, we must have at least as much concern for a partner as for self - a requirement that doesn't live comfortably alongside the exhortation to 'do your own thing.' In the end, we are left with an extraordinarily heightened set of expectations about the possibilities in human relationships that lives side by side with disillusion that, for many, borders on despair. — Lillian B. Rubin

It was enough to disillusion a man, Red Philips remarked, if a man were silly enough to have illusions. Red — James Brady

The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity. — D.H. Lawrence

It's not the sex you think i've had. it's the sex i want. that's what you smell on me. because the more i look at you, the more i know about us both.and the more i want to have sex with you. because there's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. it's the antidote to disillusion. the counterpoison._Eric Packer — Don DeLillo

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

Illusions are hazardous, and so are disillusions. — Mason Cooley

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

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

One dominant response to the Great War was "disillusion" and a repudiation of principles named by such lofty abstractions as Honor, Patriotism, Virtue, and Beauty. It is easy to find examples of that solvent at work. But in another sense, the response to the war, especially on the continent, and most particularly in Germany, was just the opposite: it was what we might call the re-enchantment, the re-illusioning, of the world by means of a wholesale embrace of empty abstractions. The re-enchantment was malign, to be sure, but it was also thoroughgoing. Nazism was the most poisonous effort.It was, as [Modris] Eksteins puts it, "an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world." This is where kitsch comes in. — Roger Kimball

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

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

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion. — F Scott Fitzgerald

For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The very nature of their work, the long periods of isolation followed by public self-display, and the associated risk of rejection all conspire to create unnaturally intense relationships with their sexual partners. Then, when disillusion occurs, as of course it must, the sense of betrayal is profound ... — Patrick McGrath

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

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

Art has been wrecked by a complete consciousness of the universe which shews that the world is to each man only a rubbish-heap limned by his individual perception. It will be saved, if at all, by the next and last step of disillusion; the realisation that complete consciousness and truth are themselves valueless, and that to acquire any genuine artistic titillation we must artificially invent limitations of consciousness and feign a pattern of life common to all mankind
most naturally the simple old pattern which ancient and groping tradition first gave us. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called 'the spokesman of despair,' and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience. — Raymond Williams

[Charles] Nodier's later view was that fantasy reconciles men to their fate. Fantasy and the taste for chimeras, he wrote, are symptoms of a time of political decay and transition, when the unpleasant realities of political life are too hard to bear. They serve a useful purpose in that they give men hope when scepticism and disillusion would otherwise drive them to despair. — Peter Partner

I'm opposed to segregation. It's basically antisocial and gives rise to the worst kind of sexism... When a boy or girl has been forced along the straight and narrow for an unnatural length of time, most of them rush headlong into unexplored territory at the first brush with freedom. I think it causes a lot of disillusion and unhappiness. — Emma Darcy

On the third day Vera said:

'I love your body because it is beautiful. But I do not know your soul. I do not know whether there is a soul. Nor is it necessary for me because your body is beautiful.

But everything is mutable and you will grow old. At first your face will grow old. Your body will live longer. An old face will be a mockery before a youthful body. And then a wasted body will be a mockery to ravenous desires.

This is like the dead light of the setting sun which from the clouds above was reflected in the water... feeble and full of disillusion.

Should I not kill you so that I might always possess you for myself.'

And Vera became terrifying.

I found this unpleasant.

But from these words I understood that she had decided upon the day.

("Thirty-Three Abominations") — Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal

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

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

Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned. — Anais Nin

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

Disillusion is the last illusion. — Wallace Stevens

There is endless happiness in this world, but provided one knows the science behind it! 'Science' can give happiness. You have become disillusioned; the wrong belief has set in and that is why you are unhappy. When the wrong belief leaves and the 'right belief' sets in, there is nothing but happiness. — Dada Bhagwan

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

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

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

Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love. — Ellen Glasgow

The hope you feel when you are in love is not necessarily for anything in particular. Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns. In this state you think no impediment can be large enough to interrupt your passion. The feeling spills beyond the object of your love to color the whole world. The mood is not unlike the mood of revolutionaries in the first blush of victory, at the dawn of hope. Anything seems possible. And in the event of failure, it will be this taste of possibility that makes disillusion bitter. — Susan Griffin

This is momentous knowledge. There is unspeakable comfort - the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates-in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me. There is, certainly, great cause for — J.I. Packer

Beauty in life and fiction is a mixture of Fairy Tale and Tragedy. Men see a pretty face and want to claim the image to fit their fantasy. When the fantasy fades away as it always does, the tragedy is that the 'real' woman he did not notice is left standing to face his disillusion and disappointment. — Lori Jones

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

Under the stars,' she repeated. 'I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to someone. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.'
It was a dream,' said John quietly. 'Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.'
How pleasant then to be insane!'
So I'm told,' said John gloomily. 'I don't know any longer. 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. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it. — F Scott Fitzgerald

At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Are you very much in love with him?' he asked. She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape.
'I wish I knew' she said at last.
He shook his head.
-'Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys.'
'What is that?'
-'Disillusion. — Oscar Wilde

There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. 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. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison

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

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

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains. — Bruce Chatwin

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

It's all right to be disillusioned, but you can't be disillusioning. — Leslie Ford

(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

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. — Kenneth Clark

I'm afraid of committing myself," she thought to herself.

"When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way."

"Don't bother trying to explain your emotions. Live everything as intensely as you can and keep whatever you felt as a gift from God. The best way to destroy the bridge between the visible and invisible is by trying to explain your emotions."

"But how will I know who my Soulmate is?" Brida felt that this was one of the most important questions she had ever asked in her life.
"By taking risks" she said to Brida. ' By risking failure, disappointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in you search for Love. As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end."

Nothing is completely wrong. Even a broken watch is right twice a day. — Paulo Coelho

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

Predilection, n. The preparatory stage of disillusion. — Ambrose Bierce

When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion. — Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

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

Who has passed by the fates of disillusion has died twice. — Ouida

Loneliness is just a passing disillusion we can conquer by acknowledging those around us. — Jenny Cutler Lopez

Perhaps this is an area where every generation starts from scratch. Although the crisis of the First World War inaugurated an especially strong period of disillusion with regard to the optimism of the previous age, the pattern has repeated itself in many ways in more recent times, e.g., the loss of faith in politics as a means of advancing human well-being. And perhaps this also has to do with basic elements in growing up. — George Pattison

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

It begins to look as though modern man cannot find his heroism in everyday life any more, as men did in traditional societies just by doing their daily duty of raising children, working, and worshiping. He needs revolutions and wars and "continuing" revolutions to last when the revolutions and wars end. That is the price modern man pays for the eclipse of the sacred dimension. When he dethroned the ideas of soul and God he was thrown back hopelessly on his own resources, on himself and those few around him. Even lovers and families trap and disillusion us because they are not substitutes for absolute transcendence. We might say that they are poor illusions in the sense that we have been discussing. — Ernest Becker

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

I realise I'll have to acquire the ability to speak to my audience in between numbers. I've never had to do that. On the street I only focus on the keyboard settings for my next song, which takes a bit of time and a lot of concentration. So I'll have to develop that new skill, which gives me pause, because I'm afraid I'll say something stupid and disillusion people when they realise I'm an ordinary earthling - in fact, as ordinary as anyone else on this planet. — Susan Schneider

Instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion. — May Sarton

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

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

I don't think I've ever gotten any significant thing I wanted. You have no idea how weird it is to envision things and have them come to nothing. No vision has ever come true, no promise has ever been kept. But then there was you, and you were the promise that would obliterate all the disappointments of the past. Everything about you insisted on it. Your color, your hair, the way light projects from every part of you. You were the sun that would burn away all the putrid broken promises of the world. — Dave Eggers

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

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has. — Juan Gabriel Vasquez

If a man says to you, "This is the truth," and you believe him, and you discover what he says is not the truth, you are disappointed and you make sure you will not be caught by him again. But a man who has lived the truth
and you have believed in what he has lived
he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing. — Harper Lee

In books there are chapters to separate out the moments, to show that time is going by and things are changing, and sometimes the parts even have titles that are full of promise - 'The Meeting', 'Hope', 'Downfall' - like paintings do. But in life there's nothing like that, no titles or signs or warnings, nothing to say 'Beware, danger!' or 'Frequent landslides' or 'Disillusion ahead'. In life you stand all alone in your costume, and too bad if it's in tatters. — Delphine De Vigan

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it. — T. S. Eliot

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

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

Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet. — Orson Scott Card

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

Yet there is no reason to think he derived any consolation from the faith he had inherited. Brought up by his father to be a good Catholic, he became an atheist who admired polytheism. Realizing that the more benign faiths of ancient times could not be revived, he defended the religion of his own time as the least harmful illusion. But he was incapable of surrendering to that illusion himself. Instead, he made a life from disillusion. — John N. Gray

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

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

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

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