154 Quotes About Disillusionment

They will not even dare take a minute and stand in front of a mirror to examine their faces lest they suddenly realize how defeated, how duped they have been all these years. There is something about staring at ourselves in the mirror that makes us question our very existence, and whether we are the kind of people that we wanted to be, a question that so many people avoid confronting.

There's truths you have to grow into.

But without Rousseau's pessimistic approach to history and without his doctrine of the depravity of the present, the nineteenth-century novel of disillusionment is just as inconceivable as the conception of tragedy held by Schiller, Kleist, and Hebbel.

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people’s.

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

After you've seen behind the facade of a stage set you can't take the play seriously any more. You can't go backwards and regain your ignorance; you have to move forward.

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

We spend our youth hunting for the reality we think lies on the other side of our illusions. What we find at the other end of our search is what lies on the other side of the movie screen: a dark and desolate space that only reveals the unreality of what we pursued. So we spend our adulthood trying to recapture the illusions. Few of us do.

Illusions must be put to death. That is the cruelty of growing up.