Delusion is believing something that is not true. We all experience delusions from time to time. These delusion quotes explore the nature of delusion in relationships, life, psychology, and more. Use these quotes to reflect on delusions and see through them more clearly.
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Delusion Quotes
- “There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth.” – Leo Tolstoy
- “Men often act knowingly against their interest.” – John Maynard Keynes
- “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” – Mark Twain
- “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” – Robertson Davies
- “All people dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – T.E. Lawrence
- “People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it’s served up.” – George R.R. Martin
- “No illusion is more crucial than the illusion that great success and huge money buy you immunity from the common ills of mankind.” – Larry McMurtry
- “It is the things which we cannot see that influence our minds the most.” – E.S. Kelly
- “People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.” – Thomas Szasz
- “Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not.” – E.R. Beadle
- “We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation.” – François de La Rochefoucauld
- “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” – Oscar Wilde
- “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” – Arthur Conan Doyle
- “Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh.” – Henry Ward Beecher
- “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.” – André Gide
- “When one has not had a good father, one must create one.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “People in a crowd don’t act together for the sake of acting together; they act together because they have a common interest.” – Rupert Crawshay-Williams
- “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t going away.” – Elvis Presley
- “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.” – Sigmund Freud
- “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire
- “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.” – Bertrand Russell
- “The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away.” – Robert M. Pirsig
- “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” – Mark Twain
- “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” – Flannery O’Connor
- “It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” – Winston Churchill
- “I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.” – Bertrand Russell
- “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” – Winston Churchill
- “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The truth does not mind being questioned.” – Unknown
- “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” – C.S. Lewis
- “Truth never damages a cause that is just.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.” – Stephanie Klein
- “It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak, and another to hear.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.” – Edward Abbey
- “Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
- “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” – Oscar Wilde
- “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” – Søren Kierkegaard
- “I don’t mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.” – Samuel Johnson
- “A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.” – Edgar J. Moone
- “A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” – William Blake
- “Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.” – Unknown
- “Truth never lost ground by inquiry.” – Thomas Jefferson
- “The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.” – Lao Tzu
- “The cruelest lies are often told in silence.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
- “There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.” – Maya Angelou
- “Truth is strong, stronger than fiction.” – Amit Kalantri
- “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.” – William Faulkner
- “We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?” – Niels Bohr
- “There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.” – Alfred Korzybski
- “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” – Winston Churchill
- “A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” – William Blake
- “When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.” – Robert Pirsig
- “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Absolute truth belongs to Thee alone.” – Thomas Aquinas
- “It takes two to speak truth – one to speak, and another to hear.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.” – Edward Abbey
- “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” – Flannery O’Connor
- “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” – Winston Churchill
- “A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” – William Blake
- “Truth never damages a cause that is just.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley
- “There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.” – Maya Angelou
- “Telling the truth and making someone cry is better than telling a lie and making someone smile.” – Unknown
- “Truth is everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
- “Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.” – Unknown
- “A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.” – Edgar J. Moone
- “A half truth is a whole lie.” – Yiddish Proverb
- “The truth is more important than the facts.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
- “It takes two to speak truth – one to speak, and another to hear.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Even if you stick a knife to my throat, I will say what I have to say.” – Malcolm X
- “Tell the truth, even if your voice shakes.” – Unknown
- “If you have to lie, cheat, steal, obstruct or bully to get your point across, then you have lost your point.” – Unknown
- “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” – Buddha
- “Always tell the truth even if it leads to your death; that would be better than a life based on a lie.” – Gautama Buddha
- “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.” – William Wilberforce
- “Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.” – James Michener
- “Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
- “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” – Winston Churchill
- “Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.” – W. Clement Stone
- “Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it’ll always get you the right ones.” – John Lennon
- “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” – Judy Garland
- “Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.” – Thomas Jefferson
- “Honesty is the fastest way to prevent a mistake from turning into a failure.” – James Altucher
- “Honesty saves everyone’s time.” – Bruno Vincent
- “Being honest is much easier than remembering lies.” – Unknown
- “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” – William Shakespeare
- “Honesty pays, but it doesn’t seem to pay enough to suit some people.” – F. M. Hubbard
- “The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.” – Pearl S. Buck
- “To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable, we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful.” – Edward R. Murrow
- “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” – Albert Einstein
- “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.” – Sir Francis Bacon
- “Truth fears no questions.” – Unknown
- “There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.” – Voltaire
- “It takes two to speak truth – one to speak, and another to hear.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Truth is everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
- “Half a truth is often a great lie.” – Benjamin Franklin
- “Truth is the glue that holds government together.” – Gerald R. Ford
- “Character is much easier kept than recovered.” – Thomas Paine
- “Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.” – W. Clement Stone
- “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
- “It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” – Thomas Sowell
- “The truth does not require a majority to prevail, ladies and gentlemen. The truth is its own power. The truth will out.” – Rush Limbaugh
- “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – Theodore Roosevelt
- “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” – Gloria Steinem
- “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” – Bertrand Russell
- “You never find yourself until you face the truth.” – Pearl Bailey
- “Men are born to lie and women to believe them.” – Henry Louis Mencken
- “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” – Mark Twain
- “Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.” – James Michener
- “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” – Mark Twain
- “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.” – Thomas Jefferson
- “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.” – Maya Angelou
- “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” – E.E. Cummings
- “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow’.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
- “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain
- “It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” – Mark Twain
- “Courage is grace under pressure.” – Ernest Hemingway
- “Courage doesn’t mean you don’t get afraid. Courage means you don’t let fear stop you.” – Bethany Hamilton
- “Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.” – Baltasar Gracian
- “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston S. Churchill
- “Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.” – Victor Hugo
- “Have the courage to live. Anyone can die.” – Robert Cody
- “Courage is the ladder on which all other virtues mount.” – Clare Boothe Luce
- “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying ‘I will try again tomorrow’.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
- “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
- “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.” – Brene Brown
- “Courage is found in unlikely places.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
- “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain
- “Courage is looking fear right in the eye and saying, ‘Get the hell out of my way. I’ve got things to do.'” – Unknown
- “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.” – Maya Angelou
- “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – Barack Obama
- “Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
- “Have faith in your skills. Negative thoughts kill.” – Usain Bolt
- “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, stand up.” – John Lewis
- “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” – Albert Einstein
- “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” – Abraham Lincoln
- “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” – Henry Ford
- “You are the one that possesses the keys to your being. You carry the passport to your own happiness.” – Diane von Furstenberg
- “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” – Oprah Winfrey
- “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” – C.S. Lewis
- “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston S. Churchill
- “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
- “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says ‘I’ll try again tomorrow’.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
- “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” – Maya Angelou
- “Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.” – Roy T. Bennett
- “Your truest life hinges on your ability to trust yourself.” ― Auliq Ice
- “Trust because you are willing to accept the risk, not because it’s safe or certain.” ― Anonymous
- “The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.” ― Eminem
- “Sometimes the hardest part isn’t letting go but rather learning to start over.” ― Nicole Sobon
- “Every time you state what you want or believe, you’re the first to hear it. It’s a message to both you and others about what you think is possible. Don’t put a ceiling on yourself.” ― Oprah Winfrey
The God Delusion Quotes
- “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” – Richard Dawkins
- “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” – Richard Dawkins
- “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” – Richard Dawkins
- “When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.” – Richard Dawkins
- “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” – Richard Dawkins
- “To be atheist is also to be evolutionary.” – Richard Dawkins
- “If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers. Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools: that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise.” – Richard Dawkins
- “There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.” – Richard Dawkins
- “As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise… It subverts science and saps the intellect.” – Richard Dawkins
- “The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don’t.” – Richard Dawkins
Delusion Quotes Relationships
- “Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
- “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.” – Sigmund Freud
- “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.” – H. L. Mencken
- “Love means to commit oneself without guarantee.” – Anne Campbell
- “Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no fruit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love in order that I may love.” – Bernard of Clairvaux
- “The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.” – Jim Rohn
- “Love is not written on paper, for paper can be erased. Nor is it etched on stone, for stone can be broken. But it is inscribed on a heart and there it shall remain forever.” – Unknown
- “We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.” – Buddha
- “Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.” – Deborah Reber
- “Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.” – Bernard Branson
- “Trying to force someone to fall in love with you is about as pointless as trying to control who you fall in love with.” – Unknown
- “When you stop chasing the wrong things you give the right things a chance to catch you.” – Lolly Daskal
- “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.” – Eckhart Tolle
Self-Delusion Quotes
- “The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we’re afraid.” – Richard Bach
- “People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.” – Hermann Hesse
- “Man would rather believe than know.” – H.L. Mencken
- “To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.” – Andy and Larry Wachowski
- “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” – Albert Einstein
- “A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.” – Anais Nin
- “People have a habit of inventing fictitious motives for their actions.” – Marcel Proust
- “We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.” – Eric Hoffer
- “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Søren Kierkegaard
- “The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.” ― E.E. Cummings
- “The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.” ― Marcel Pagnol
- “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” ― George Carlin
- “It is far more important to be able to hit the target than it is to haggle over who makes a better bow.” ― Henry Ward Beecher
- “The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.” ― Jane Wagner
Delusion Quotes About Life
- “Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?” – Fredrich Nietzsche
- “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” – Oscar Wilde
- “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” – Mark Twain
- “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.” – Walt Whitman
- “Reality continues to ruin my life.” – Bill Watterson
- “Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
- “Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth.” – Benjamin Disraeli
- “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” – C.S. Lewis
- “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.” ― Bob Marley
- “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” ― Oscar Wilde
- “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
- “A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” ― William Blake
- “It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak, and another to hear.” ― Henry David Thoreau
- “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” ― Alice Walker
- “Truth never damages a cause that is just.” ― Mahatma Gandhi
Delusion Quotes Psychology
- “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” – Carl Jung
- “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung
- “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” – Carl Jung
- “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung
- “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.” – Carl Jung
- “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” – Carl Jung
- “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” – Carl Jung
- “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
- “The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.” – Caroline Myss
- “The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.” – Deepak Chopra
- “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” – Rumi
- “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi
- “Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.” – Rumi
- “Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.” – Rumi
Short Delusion Quotes
- “All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.” – Robert Southey
- “We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
- “The fly that doesn’t want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.” – G.C. Lichtenberg
- “It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.” – Walter Lippmann
- “We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.” – Terry Hands
- “The larger the mind, the greater the need for simplicity.” – Charles de Lint
- “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” – Stephen Covey
- “Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.” – H.L. Mencken
- “It is by believing in roses that you make them bloom.” – Anatole France
Delusion Quotes for Instagram
- “The truth is rarely pure and never simple ☀️” (Oscar Wilde)
- “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend 👀” (Robertson Davies)
- “All deception in the course of life is a lie reduced to practice 🤥” (Robert Southey)
- “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it 🧐” (Andre Gide)
- “It requires wisdom to understand wisdom 🌕” (Walter Lippmann)
- “Reality continues to ruin my life 😒” (Bill Watterson)
- “Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another 💖” (H. L. Mencken)
- “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth 💫” (Walt Whitman)
- “Trying to force love is about as pointless as trying to control it 💌”
- “Let yourself be drawn by what you love, not what hurts ✨” (Rumi)
- “The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers 💔” (Deepak Chopra)