#delusion

I want to make enough money to buy an island. Something modest, like Australia.
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— Jarod Kintz

#ambitious #australia #delusion #delusional #desire

We live, I suppose, in the unconfessed hope that the rules will at some point be broken, along with the normal course of things and custom and history, and that this will happen to us, that we will experience it, that we — that is, I alone — will be the ones to see it. We always aspire, I suppose, to being the chosen ones, and it is unlikely otherwise that we would be prepared to live out the entire course of an entire life, which, however short or long, gradually gets the better of us. ↗

— Javier Marías

#exceptionalism #optimism #experience

[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. ↗

— Sam Harris

#delusion #faith #harris #religion #sam

We all know dogmatists who are more concerned about holding their opinions than about investigating their truth. ... if they are mistaken, they will never discover it; they have condemned themselves to perpetual error. Human beings (including myself) sometimes use their beliefs for wish-fulfillment. Too often we believe what we want to be true. ↗

— David L. Wolfe

#dogma #self-delusion #wishful-thinking #self-belief

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions. ↗

— Tony Kushner

#respect

If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion. ↗

— Max Scheler

#age

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. ↗

— Thomas Reed

#delusions #evils #greatest #hope #legislation

[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#battles #hegel #history #life #reminiscence

Our country is the best country in the world. We are swimming in prosperity and our President is the best president in the world. We have larger apples and better cotton and faster and more beautiful machines. This makes us the greatest country in the world. Unemployment is a myth. Dissatisfaction is a fable. In preparatory school America is beautiful. It is the gem of the ocean and it is too bad. It is bad because people believe it all. Because they become indifferent. Because they marry and reproduce and vote and they know nothing. ↗

— John Cheever

#delusions #dissatisfaction #fables #indifference #jokes

Her hair looked like her hair in the dream and her eyes looked like her eyes in the dream, and as for her body, he couldn't tell, she was wearing a mumu. ↗

— George Saunders

#dreams #love #obesity #dreams