#disillusionment

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 had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down. That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#empire-state-building #farewells #new-york-city #beauty

So what are we given? We're also given, my generation, the disillusionment of our parents. ↗

— Jewel Kilcher

#disillusionment #generation #given #my generation #our

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

#dreams #knowledge #learning #dreams

All knowledge hurts. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#disillusionment #experience #knowledge #wisdom #experience

Love is a disease of the youth; most of us go through it. A few are cured, the rest are disabled. ↗

— Martin Foreman

#love #love

When you once see something as false which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human, then you can never go back to it. ↗

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

#nature

I'm too old to know everything ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#humour #youthful-arrogance #arrogance