Quotes about disillusionment

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.

The piercing fanfare of the brass against the brutal boom and rattle of the drums surged through the air. At the head of the Ferris band marched the drum majorette. A crimson and white shako crowned her long dark hair which flew out behind her and across her radiant face flushed with excitement. Her blue eyes flashed and her smile registered triumph at having been chosen.

Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it’s adhering to our scripts or not.

I’ve drawn this as a circle because the seasons will come and go. Joy always leads to another season of romance . . . which always leads to another season of trouble . . . which always leads to disillusionment . . . which always leads to more joy— if you hang in there.

Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one's eyes, one's facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only "people," but the v

The world is a cruel place, Petrosinella, and it wounds the weak.

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

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.

Nostalgia is an illness for those who haven't realized that todayis tomorrow's nostalgia.

I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.

Pandora's Box could not be unopened, no one could return to Eden.

All knowledge hurts.

The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don't want to go there.

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Never shy away from opportunity and wholehearted living. Never be fearful of putting yourself out there. The courageous may encounter many disappointments, experience profound disillusionment, gather many wounds; but cherish your scars for they are the proud emblems of a truly phenomenal life. The fearful, cautious, cynical and self-repressed do not live at all. And that is simply no way to be in this world.

Regret comes in four tones that operate in unison to shape our lives. First, we regret the life that we lived, the decisions we made, the words we said in anger, and enduring the shame wrought from experiencing painful failures in work and love. Secondly, we regret the life we did not live, the opportunities missed, the adventures postponed indefinitely, and the failure to become someone else other than whom we now are. American author Shannon L. Alder said, ‘One of the greatest regrets in life

Sadness at that age had the pleasing texture of imprisonment: you reared and sulked against the bonds of parents and school and age, things that kept you from the certain happiness that awaited. When I was a sophomore in college, I had a boyfriend who spoke breathlessly of running away to Mexico - it didn't occur to me that we could no longer run away from home.

Love may precede respect but it cannot survive the loss of it.

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.

All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I

It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried first my mother, then my father. His hair gone wispy as a child's. I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

Words drop from my lips spiraling downward; they land scattered on your ears. I spoke them green and golden, but you turned them shriveled brown.

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.

Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real.

I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.

Did Cinderella wonder whether her prince would have cared for her had he first seen her in her everyday clothes? Did she believe the ladies of the palace were truly her friends or did she suspect they were just friendly because she was the princess and wore beautiful gowns?Did she fear that life could again change? Everything could disappear as it had done when the clock struck twelve?Did Cinderella wonder whether her good fortune was real or the trick of a magic wand?It’s a sad thing to lose be

Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don't have it.

You are very harsh.''I have seen the world.

Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.

It had been an awful thing to lose Henry the first time, to matrimony, but to discover what a false front he was capable of was another kind of blow, and it had left her almost speechless. Then there was the fury with herself—for she had known what Henry’s love was, and still she had gone back to suffer a little more at his hands.

Too often it’s about what stands before us, not what stands within us.

[S]omehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.

I'm too old to know everything

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.

I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now - medals where my soul used to be.

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.

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.

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.

How can any of us even know what to believe anymore? Our culture’s full of so much phoniness and deception. Companies advertise products to make us believe that we will be more beautiful, more healthy, or live longer by consuming their products. We are seduced by lovers who feed their porn addictions when we’re asleep. We’re taught to believe that if we work hard and take risks, that we can achieve our dreams, yet youth unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades. Fairytales tell us that tr

The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her. It had been answered long, long ago, claimed Moss; man's very essence lay in the fact that he had elected to command. But to Stenham that seemed a shallow reply. To him wisdom consisted in the conscious and joyous obedience to natural laws, yet when he had said that to Moss, Moss had laughed pityingly. 'My dear man, wisdom is a primitive concept,' he had told him. 'What we want now is knowl

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.

It should not be possible for Christians to be disillusioned. We should have no illusions in the first place. Our faith is in Jesus Christ alone.

Disillusioned, people simply carried out their work as intended, drinking away sobriety at the end of each hard shift and repeating the process until death.

Just realize that the Mechanics do not exist and are not worthy of your attention. Unless they threaten you, and then you must kill them, Mage Alain. Mechanics are as merciless as they are mercenary. If any appear dangerous, kill them. ...What if he had remembered that advice during the bandit attack, when the Mechanic had pointed her weapon at his face? He could have killed her then. He could have tried at least. Then, when she was dead, the bandits would have found Alain and killed him, too. C

The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men’s House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility … The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or win

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me.

If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say?I should

Dreaming about being an actress, is more exciting then being one.

Captain Harcourt-Bruce was not only dashing, handsome, and brave, he was also rather romantic. The reappearance of magic in England thrilled him immensely. He was a great reader of the more exciting sort of history - and his head was full of ancient battles in which the English were outnumbered by the French and doomed to die, when all at once would be heard the sound of strange, unearthly music, and upon a hilltop would appear the Raven King in his tall, black helmet with it's mantling of raven

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.

Stupid girl. 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.

I wish they'd conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn't. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there are. Sometimes at work I get the feeling that it's got to be right up against 100%. I’ll head out to the register to help out during the lunch rush and the new cashier will look so confused and lost, and then I’ll look at the customers she’s supposed to be helping, and they’ll look lost, too, and then when I sneak a glance toward the

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

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.

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.

This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intellige

Lack of sound mind and judgement – the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions, is a matter of frustration and disillusionment to God

We are sorry about the way things turned out. We gave, in the phrasing of our words if not literally in the words themselves, the false impression that these pages might hold some small fragment, some slight fragrance of a greater truth. That there might be something here to be learned. Before we go any further the author of this cartoon wishes to make an apology. Such an impression was deliberately cultivated. It is a ruse. It is a lie. We are every bit as lost and afraid as children abandoned

When you confront, you save yourself of disillusionment.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

It's true we all build imaginary prisons for ourselves. Believe that we are trapped behind the invisible bars of the lives we have somehow carelessly constructed for ourselves, despite our youthful promises to ourselves. We see adults who are stagnant and miserable as we grow up. They graffiti the walls behind them with their mistakes and we swear secret oaths that we will heed those warnings. We’re much too clever, we know all the shortcuts and the back alleys.

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.

We must help men and women see the epic in the ordinary details of life.

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.

...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

In our world, to do what you want to do, you must first do what you have to do.

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.

The institution known as "school" isn't just a facility for doing classwork. It's essentially a microcosm of society, all of humanity put together in a little diorama. Bully exists in schools because war and conflict exist in the world, and school castes reflect our stratified, hierarchical society. Living in a democracy, the tyranny of the majority naturally applies at school, too. The majority -- that is to say, the people with the most friends -- are superior.

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.

There's truths you have to grow into.

Once the dust of volcanic love has settled and the harshness of a new reality has become oppressive, disillusionment may have to be mended, wounds to be healed and emotional fallouts to be taken care of, mindfully ( "Is that all there is ?")

She lost her illusions in the collapse of her sympathies.

They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion.

How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.

As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance.

Achievement is the death of endeavor and the birth of disgust.

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

Jerusalem has a way of disappointing in tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to this city's asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion.

There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand.

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fin

My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which had been my master's --- which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr Rochester's arms --- it could not

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

Strike said "Huh" again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke.

your facethrough the blurred visionof my disillusioned eyesmergeswith the rest of them.

He tells me he can't believe how bitter he has become, how sour, that all his life he had been one of the most fun, one of the happiest, one of the most joyous people anyone knew, and now he was like a crumpled piece of steel covered in rust. The way he describes himself, a 'crumpled piece of steel covered in rust,' I don't think I'll ever forget those precise words or his voice as he said them.

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

Maybe I had been making a greater monster of him than he really was, or maybe I was still under his influence, for I was certain that he wanted me to believe he was no more than a harmless man who happened to use vampirism to get what he desired. Some remnant of his mesmerism was still upon me. I had never been able to shake the feeling that he was tucked away in a corner of my mind, that he could read my thoughts, know what I was thinking. He had done something to me, but what that was, I had n

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment.

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the n

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.

Every day we make the whole world new... Or else grow old.

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.

Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.