94 Disillusionment Quotes

So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

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.

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

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.

The massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.

We thought being offered the M.B.E. [Member of the Order of the British Empire] was as funny as everybody else thought it was. Why? What for? We didn't believe it. It was a part we didn't want. We all met and agreed it was daft.

This is unfortunately a world in which things find it difficult, frequently impossible, to live up to their names.

O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

In one sense, I have always felt glad to have had the war [World War II] in my childhood, because, as a result, nothing that has happened in the world since then has ever seemed quite so bad. On the other hand, I never entirely got over my feeling of being cheated when the promised era of peace in a wonderful 'post-war world' failed to materialize. I could not understand how, after all that, people could ever even think of fighting again. And I still can't.

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. . . .

I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was: nothingness.

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words 'bliss,' 'passion,' and 'rapture' -- words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

I pledge impertinence to the flag waving, of the unindicted co-conspirators of America, and to the republicans for which I can't stand, one abomination, underhanded fraud, indefensible, with Liberty and Justice... Forget it.

Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.

I don't like animals. It's a strange thing, I don't like men and I don't like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him.

Society triumphs over many. They wish to regenerate the world with their institutions, with their moral philosophy, with their love. Then they sink to living from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, with a little worsted work, and to looking forward to nothing but bed. When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind - with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?

The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Psychologically, there is nothing in the world that you can put your faith, your trust, or your belief in. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing. That is a scientific fact, as well as a psychological fact. Because, your leaders-religious and political-and your books-sacred and profane-have all failed, and you are still confused, in misery, in conflict. So, that is an absolute, undeniable fact.

Now that I can see it's the queen's new clothes Now that I can hear all your poison prose Now that I can talk with my tongue unfroze I'm not so sure of Santa or the buck tooth fairy There are no words for me inside your dictionary

I was raised on the good book Jesus Till I read between the lines Now I don't believe I ever wanna see the morning

There is more selfishness and less principle among members of Congress, as well as others, than I had any conception [of], before I became President of the U.S.

Rows and flows of angel hair, And ice cream castles in the air, And feather canyons ev'rywhere, I've looked at clouds that way. But now they only block the sun, They rain and snow on ev'ryone, So many things I would have done But clouds got in my way.

My son - and what's a son? A thing begot Within a pair of minutes, thereabout: A lump bred up in darkness.

There was no use in pretending, no magic left to hear. All the music gave me was a craving for light beer.

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix - a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get...

Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet. -Children of the Mind

Adultery, Emma was discovering, could be as banal as marriage.

I was the dreamweaver, but now I'm reborn I was the Walrus, but now I'm John And so dear friends, you'll just have to carry on The dream is over.

Vanity: 'Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.'

Quelle est cette ile triste et noire? - C'est Cythere, Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garcons. Regardez, apres tout, c'est une pauvre terre.

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty - and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

By the end of the decade it had become obvious that perhaps the one constant of our variegated and strung-out peer groups was a pervasive sense of self-consciousness that sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be together and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock 'n' roll and came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about fifteen stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country! So we loved and loved and doted on ourselves and our reflections in each other even as the whole thing got out of hand and turned into mud and disaster areas and downs and death.

I'm just dazzled by the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism.

Comrades, I've voyaged long and far on sea and soul, my eyes have seen disease, gods, ghosts, and men, and yet in no land have I seen a more false, murderous siren than that wind-headed, babbling, blind bitch-hound called Hope!

She began to understand things she had never understood before. The world was not as clear and simple a place as she had thought till now.

I thought that when I trusted you, that meant you would always act the way I wanted you to.

I cannot believe in a paradise Glorious, undefiled, For gates all scrolled and streets of gold Are tales for a dreaming child. I am too lost for shame That it moves me unto mirth, But I can vision a Hell of flame For I have lived on earth.

Canaris was a highly intelligent and sensitive man with many likeable qualities. He loved his dogs and his horse almost more than any other living creatures. He often said to me, 'Schellenberg, always remember the goodness of animals. You see, my dachshund is discreet and will never betray me - I cannot say that of any human being...'

Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

The theatre was full - crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there; palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged and so hushed. Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising. She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos - hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing - half lava, half glow. I had heard this woman termed 'plain,' and I expected bony harshness and grimness - something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame. For awhile - a long while - I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength - for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood. It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation. It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral. Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public - a milder condiment for a people's palate - than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised. Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest crimson threw her out, white like alabaster - like silver: rather, be it said, like Death.

No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country... nor for the world, I dare say... None... Gone.

We drove about, looking for churches, my father and I. My father, as you probably know, was a clergyman - he knew all the Uppland churches like the back of his hand. We went to morning services in variouis places and were deeply impressed by the spiritual poverty of these churches, by the lack of any congregation and the miserable spiritual status of the clergy, the poverty of their sermons, and the nonchalance and indifference of the ritual. In one church, I remember - and I think it has a great deal to do with the end of the film - Father and I were sitting together. My father had already been retired for many years, and was old and frail.... Just before the bell begins to toll, we hear a car outside, a shining Volvo: the clergyman climbs out hurriedly, and there is a faint buzz from the vestry, and then the clergyman appears before he ought to - when the bell stops, that is - and says he feels very poorly and that he's talked to the rector and the rector has said he can use an abbrviated form of the service and drop the part at the altar. So there would be just one psalm and a sermon and another psalm. And goes out. Whereon my father, furious, began hammering on the pew, got to his feet and marched out into the vestry, where a long mumbled conversation ensued; after which the churchwarden also went in, then someone ran up the organ gallery to fetch the organist, after which the churchwarden came out and announced that there would be a complete service after all. My father took the service at the altar, but at the beginning and the end. In some way I feel the end of the play was influenced by my father's intervention - that at all costs one must do what it is one's duty to do, particularly in spiritual contexts. Even if it can seem meaningless.

When I hear so much impatient and irritable complaint, so much readiness to replace what we have by guardians for us all, those supermen, evoked somewhere from the clouds, whom none have seen and none are ready to name, I lapse into a dream, as it were. I see children playing on the grass; their voices are shrill and discordant as children's are; they are restive and quarrelsome; they cannot agree to any common plan; their play annoys them; it goes poorly. And one says, let us make Jack the master; Jack knows all about it; Jack will tell us what each is to do and we shall all agree. But Jack is like all the rest; Helen is discontented with her part and Henry with his, and soon they fall again into their old state. No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master. And in the end slowly and with infinite disappointment they do learn a little; they learn to forbear, to reckon with another, accept a little where they wanted much, to live and let live, to yield when they must yield; perhaps, we may hope, not to take all they can. But the condition is that they shall be willing at least to listen to one another, to get the habit of pooling their wishes. Somehow or other they must do this, if the play is to go on; maybe it will not, but there is no Jack, in or out of the box, who can come to straighten the game.

these sobering sights I've seen in the City of Angels have all been one rude awakening that was due to me in this city of fallen angels

I once thought you were the only island of sanity in a screwed-up world. You had no connections except your parents. You didn't get emotionally involved... No waste. No lies. No illusions. Then you fall in love with a woman and she leaves you and you come to me with this story and I swear... I've lost all faith in the human race

To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience

He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

Leo Ryan's life and his deeds are about a life that was so much more than Guyana. He was relentless in his search for answers, answers that were not readily available by just asking questions...We remember him today because his story is so much like those of most Americans; we want to believe the best and we sometimes hear the worst.

Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux. (I have come too late into a world too old.)

But then I ask myself, I have never truly known the man whose flank I have lead one difficult and ascetic life for. Perhaps he has played with my idealism, taking advantage for dark scopes that he has held hidden within himself. How can I expect to know a man who has never opened his heart to me? Till now I do not know what he really thought, knew or wanted. I was alone with my thoughts and my suspicions. And now, the veil that covered this statue has fallen to the ground and instead of an art work, a monster has revealed itself. Now we leave to the historians of the future the task of discussing if that statue was therefore a sin from the beginning, or was changed because of the circumstances. I continue to make the same error: I try to think back to his humble origins. But then I remember how many sons of these people have sealed their history with his name.

Infancy, n. The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, 'Heaven lies about us.' The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

Road, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

'Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.'

'It's a lion, I know it's a lion,' thought Shasta. 'I'm done. I wonder, will it hurt much? I wish it was over. I wonder, does anything happen to people after they're dead? O-o-oh! Here it comes! ... Why, it's not nearly as big as I thought! It's only half the size. No, it isn't even quarter the size. I do declare it's only the cat!! I must have dreamed all that about its being as big as a horse.' (ch. 6)

You write such pretty words, but life's no story book.

I also told them of the manner in which I had been knocked down and dragged out, and that I didn't consider it a fair fight any how they could fix it. I put the ingredients in the cup pretty strong I tell you, and I concluded my speech by telling them that I was done with politics for the present, and they might all go to hell, and I would go to Texas.

When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.

We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it.

He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion - mankind, including Frenchmen.

Friendship is but a name.

It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband's bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.

God, from whose territory I had withdrawn my ambassadors at the age of fourteen. It had become obvious that he was never going to do a thing I said.

A fool there was and he made his prayer (Even as you and I!) To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair We called her the woman who did not care), But the fool he called her his lady fair (Even as you and I!)

We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth, We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung, And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth. God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

For tho' I know he loves me, To-night my heart is sad; His kiss was not so wonderful As all the dreams I had.

Grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated then ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

We have discovered that what a year ago seemed to be a neglected house is essentially a ruin. This is not a pleasant fact, and it is not surprising that all of us are rather annoyed and disappointed about it.

First melted off the hope of youth Then Fancy's rainbow fast withdrew And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew 'Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow servile insincere But worse to trust to my own mind And find the same corruption there

So the great affair is over/ but whoever would have guessed/ it would leave us all so vacant/ and so deeply unimpressed/ It's like our visit to the moon/ or to that other star/ I guess you go for nothing/ if you really want to go that far