"Self-delusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and perfect belief that she had never loved any but Enderby. But alas! what chance was there of this testimony being received; the very point of Enderby's accusation being, that they both looked, perhaps in self-delusion, at the connection with him as their security from the consequences of Hope's weakness in marrying Hester? It was all confused—all wretched—all nearly hopeless. Margaret would be sacrificed without knowing why— would have her heart wrung with the sense of ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... important link, on which everything depends—the appearance of the risen one—is the entire failure of all the attempts at explaining that appearance from a seeming death, from an intended deception, from a self-delusion, from a vision and an ecstasy, from a poetic myth; in short, from any other cause than, that the Lord really appeared to his disciples as the man who was dead, but who is risen and lives. We cannot follow Keim in all his methods ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... entangled in the meshes of a wide conspiracy, in which he and his patient and their friends, and-Nature herself, are involved. What wonder that the history of Medicine should be to so great an extent a record of self-delusion! ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... without necessarily losing the power of enthusiasm. It also explains why Father Faber regarded an honest sense of the ridiculous as a help to goodness. The man or woman who is impervious to the absurd cannot well be stripped of self-delusion. For him, for her, there is no shaft which wounds. The admirable advice of Thomas a Kempis to keep away from people whom we desire to please, and the quiet perfection of his warning to the censorious, "In judging others, a man toileth in vain; ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... determination, or to understand if he could the grounds on which she had acted, a new conception of his own life and the meaning of it had taken possession of him. He fell into the profoundest humiliation and self-abasement, denouncing himself as a traitor to his faith, who out of mere self-delusion, and a lawless love of ease, had endangered his own obedience, and neglected the plain task laid upon him. That fear of proselytism, that humble dread of his own influence, which had once determined his whole attitude towards those about him, began now to seem to him mere wretched cowardice ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sorrowful gestures, on the scene of its passion. But once given the belief that a spirit might tend to remain for a time in the place where its earthly life was lived, the terrors of man, his swift imagination, his power of self-delusion, ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... streets on Saturday night—except those lost in the monomania of a dream, didn't want to work, they didn't even wish to be virtuous. They turned continually to the bypaths of pleasure, that self-delusion and forgetfulness of drink. Yes, released from the tyrannies of poverty, they flung themselves into a swift spending. The poor were more securely married than the rich, the dull than the imaginative—married, he meant, in the sense of a forged bond, a stockade. This latter condition ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... something peculiar in her lot: her relation to her father had claimed unusual sacrifices from her husband. Tito had once thought that his love would make those sacrifices easy; his love had not been great enough for that. She was not justified in resenting a self-delusion. No! resentment must not rise: all endurance seemed easy to Romola rather than a state of mind in which she would admit to herself that Tito acted unworthily. If she had felt a new heartache in the solitary hours ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... life of opulent self-delusion, which my aunts were never tired of nursing; and I was too young to doubt the reality of it. All the members of our little household held up their heads, as if each said, in so many words, "There is no original sin in our composition, whatever of that commodity there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... in the dense blue sky, like the King of Thule's goblet of gold flung into a deep sea, and again I behold those two heads leaning together, the one fair, the other dark; my wife, my friend—those two whose lives were a million times dearer to me than my own. Ah! they were happy days—days of self-delusion always are. We are never grateful enough to the candid persons who wake us from our dream—yet such are in truth our best friends, could ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... enterprise of them all. It was as if his apostasy from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man. The will to power was his answer to Christianity's affectation of humility and self-sacrifice; eternal recurrence was his mocking criticism of Christian optimism and millennialism; the superman ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche |
