"Delusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have been fortunate in securing material advantages, too many times look upon the world as an accident placed here for their personal enjoyment. It never takes long in business to relieve their minds of this delusion, but they sometimes accomplish a tremendous amount of damage before it happens. For a pert, know-it-all manner coupled with the inefficiency which is almost inseparable from a total lack of experience is not likely to make personal contacts pleasant. Every young man ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... most striking features in the early history of the secession is the apparent delusion in the minds of the leaders that secession could not result in war. Even after the firing upon Sumter, the delusion continued to exist. Misled, perhaps, by the opinion of ex-President Pierce,[1] the South believed that the North would be divided; that ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... many things. Prominent among these was a conception of the preponderant amount he had yet to learn. Another matter of illumination involved the relation of clothes to man. He had been reared in the delusion that the person who gave thought to that which he wore, must necessarily think of nothing else. Very confusing, therefore, was the experience of having representatives of this same class immeasurably outdistance him ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... some of those aboard the burning ship could be heard to shout. Evidently more than one of them had taken the Mermaid for a delusion of their ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... entered; but, to our astonishment, we found no proper cavern, but only an entrance to a cavern a few feet in depth. Visible from a distance, it must often have been passed by the hunters, although, as we were assured by our companions—who were astonished at the delusion—-no one had ventured to enter it ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... the Salem witchcraft. What is a "witch"? Was this delusion common at that time? What two colonies were intimately united to Massachusetts? What ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... hours of deeper conviction are life's real hours! Summer is sunshine and beauty, not storm and snow. There are dark and wintry days in March, when spring seems a delusion. There are days in April so cold that summer seems a snare. But between the storms there are brief warm intervals when the sun falls soft on the south hillsides, and the roots begin to stir and the ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... in his essay On Londoners and Country People we find Hazlitt writing: 'London is the only place in which the child grows completely up into the man. I have known characters of this kind, which, in the way of childish ignorance and self-pleasing delusion, exceeded anything to be met with in Shakespeare or Ben ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the occupation of the Danubian principalities, in order to enable his armies to march to Constantinople. But Austria and Prussia would not consent to this, and the Czar found himself opposed virtually by all Europe. He still labored under the delusion that England would hold aloof, knowing the peace policy of the English government under the leadership of Lord Aberdeen. Under this delusion, and boiling over with anger, he suddenly, without taking counsel of his ministers or of any living soul, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... witches, if cast into water; but they would still preserve their proper corporeal gravity if placed in a scale. Unless, then, we suppose Delrio to have been the dupe of some singular and unaccountable delusion on this point, the typanitic affections of the convulsionnaires will not account for the anti-gravitating phenomena ascribed to medieval witchcraft. There are some reasons, however, for the belief that these appearances may not have been wholly imaginary; for ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... whether it is the best money that can be had by the business world. A change in the rate of increase in the purchasing power of the coinage metal has a really disturbing effect; a steady and calculable appreciation does not. There exists in some acute minds what I venture to call a delusion about the effect on business classes of an advance in the purchasing power of gold that proceeds for a long time at a uniform rate. Conceding the prospect of a decided gain in the value of this metal, we may deny absolutely that, if it is ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... notice. Greg, I wonder how many cadets have been lonesome enough to propose to some girl, and afterwards find out it was all a mistake? And how many girls fall in love with the uniform, thinking all the while that it's the fellow in the uniform? How many cadets and girls recover from the delusion only in after years when it's too late. I tell you, Greg, when a fellow gets into this cadet life, I think the practice of going too often to a hop may be dangerous for ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... years of malediction, during which he had exhausted every form of threat and appeal to enforce his rights. He had hoped on wildly to the last. He had watched the progress of my attachment to her, and had encouraged it under a frantic delusion, that the final detection of it would place her at his mercy. His mind had been so wrought upon by this terrible passion, and the plots and schemes he was forever weaving to win or ensnare her, that much of his conduct which had appeared to me monstrous and absurd, became ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... have the key to the large popularity of the delusion—as I think it. We have long ceased in England to take much interest in saints, and in the recent revival of the cultus of St. George, the saint is little more than a patriotic figurehead. And the appeal to the saints to succour us is certainly not a common English practice; it is held ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... rooted in the human mind is the belief that it is only a departure to another place and a different condition of life. Can a conviction that has been universal in all ages and among all peoples be a delusion? Then whoever or whatever created human nature built it on a lie. This accursed rock has fallen on my body, and holds it as if it were a mere clod of earth, as it soon may be; but it does not hold my mind. My thoughts have followed father and dear, dear mother, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... another to behold the show, till the Abbey was nearly empty, while he tried to work out the perplexing question whether all this pomp and splendour were truly for the glory of God, or whether it were a delusion for the temptation of men's souls. It was a debate on which his old and his new guides seemed to him at issue, and he was drawn in both directions—now by the beauty, order, and deep symbolism of the Catholic ritual, now by the spirituality ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... allies, as was so nobly advocated by the sister of Marie Antoinette, there would have been a clean sheet in history about them, though it is obvious in many quarters that the historians have extended all the arts of ambiguity and delusion to make them appear flawless benefactors. Therefore one has to take all the circumstances handed down from many varied sources, reliable and unreliable, and after mature thought form conclusions as one's judgment may direct as to the merits and demerits of every phase ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... is not my primary purpose to edify, entertain, or instruct a million women with poems, stories, and fashion-hints. Mr. Bok may think it is. He is merely the innocent victim of a harmless delusion, and he draws a salary for being deluded. To be frank and confidential with you, "The Ladies' Home Journal" is published expressly for the advertisers. The reason I can put something in the magazines that will catch the ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt
... And the marvel is, that he himself should not have known it,—he who knew why, precisely why, every candidate had been nominated, from Madison to General Taylor. In the teeth of all the facts, he still cherished the amazing delusion that the Presidency of the United States, like the Premiership of England, is the natural and just reward of long and able public service. The Presidency, on the contrary, is not merely an accident, but it is an accident of the last moment. It is a game too difficult for ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... can see myself!" said the Jonquil. "Oh! oh! how I smell! Up in the little room in the gable stands a little dancing girl. She stands sometimes on one foot, sometimes on both; she seems to tread on all the world. She's nothing but an ocular delusion: she pours water out of a teapot on a bit of stuff—it is her bodice. 'Cleanliness is a fine thing,' she says; her white frock hangs on a hook; it has been washed in the teapot too, and dried on the roof. She puts it on and ties her saffron handkerchief round her neck, and the dress looks ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... be under some delusion, Agatha. Perhaps you have been told some falsehood about me. Or you may have misunderstood something that I have said to you. Only let me know what it is, and a word ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... plainest rules of justice, and that he really was the murderer of two innocent women.—Hale's motives were most laudable.—CAMPBELL'S Lives of the Chief Justices, i. 512, 561, 566. It was not to be expected of the colonists of New England that they should be the first to see through a delusion which befooled the whole civilized world, and the gravest and most knowing persons in it.—The people of New England believed what the wisest men of the world believed at the end of the seventeenth century.—PALFREY, New England, iv. 127, 129 (also speaking of witchcraft). Il est donc bien ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... Christianity as any other Freethinker is entitled to ridicule the miracles at Lourdes; and when 'taste' is dragged into the question, I simply reply that there is as much ill taste in the one case as in the other. All that this 'taste' can mean is that no devout delusion should be ridiculed, which is itself one of the greatest pieces of absurdity ever perpetrated. It would shield every form of 'spiritual' ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... about the service of her lord. Mr. NORMAN MCKINNEL as Wachner easily contrived to convey the typically Teuton blend of brutishness, and domestic sentimentality, combined with the heavy playfulness which by a curious delusion, ineradicably racial, is mistaken over there for humour. "Ja, ja," he says complacently, "I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... is a fatal delusion, and unless you turn and repent, and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, death can only plunge you into deeper misery. You have only a little while! Oh, I beseech you, don't cast away your last chance to secure ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... desk in his library at Fulcombe Priory. He had been writing at the desk, for on it was a piece of paper on which appear these words: "I have seen her. I—" There the writing ends, not stating whom he thought he had seen in the moments of mental disturbance or delusion which preceded his decease. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... against his paper rights as a citizen, the Negro faces facts which make his citizenship seem like a snare and a delusion. Let us suppose that a member of the American Negro Academy wishes with wife or daughter to visit Florida for his health. He cannot make the journey there like a white man, whether citizen or foreigner, ...
— The Ballotless Victim of One-Party Governments - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 16 • Archibald H. Grimke
... unusual; for mothers, despite their reputation to the contrary, really are the blindest creatures. Sophia, the naive ninny, had actually supposed that her walking along a hundred yards of pavement with a god by her side was not going to excite remark! What a delusion! It is true, certainly, that no one saw the god by direct vision. But Sophia's cheeks, Sophia's eyes, the curve of Sophia's neck as her soul yearned towards the soul of the god—these phenomena were immeasurably more notable than Sophia guessed. An account of them, in a modified form to ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... in his stuffy cabin punctually at eight, and made gross and revolting noises like a water-logged trump. It was odious not to be able to worry oneself in comfort on board one's own ship. Everything in this world, I reflected, even the command of a nice little barque, may be made a delusion and a snare for the unwary ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... The language of Imagination is Art, for it speaks through symbols so that men shut up in their selfhoods are thus ever reminded that nature herself is a symbol. When this is once fully realised, we are freed from the delusion imposed upon us from without by the seemingly fixed reality of external things. If we consider all material things as symbols, their suggestiveness, and consequently their reality, is continually expanding. "I rest not from my ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... never from his mind, came more fully before him—that likeness, was it real, or only a delusion of alcohol? And what else had Rochester done? He seemed mad enough to have done anything, plum crazy—would he, Jones, be held accountable for Rochester's deeds? He was fighting with this question when a clock began to strike in the darkness and close to the ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... to tell me what you like; but I can tell you that it's no such thing as a delusion, for I've proved it myself to be ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... conquered the people of my native land. All reasoning with me was consequently in vain. I had made up my mind not to stand idle and be a looker-on in such times; the fervour of my youth had been worked upon by the delusion of the day, and it would not admit of this restraint; therefore, without farther ceremony, in spite of my father's expostulations, I enrolled my name as a member of the Everly Troop of Yeomanry, under the command of the gallant Captain ASTLEY. I ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... the people has gone forth proclaiming me the Chief Magistrate of this glorious Union, nothing upon their part remaining to be done, it may be thought that a motive may exist to keep up the delusion under which they may be supposed to have acted in relation to my principles and opinions; and perhaps there may be some in this assembly who have come here either prepared to condemn those I shall now deliver, or, approving them, to doubt the sincerity with which they are now uttered. But ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... the earth herself may be tampered with, and an incantation may call man or any of his possessions to attention. But space is too great a thing, space is the inconceivable Hand, holding aloft this fragile delusion that is our world. There is no power that can mock at space, there is no enchantment that is not lost between us and the moon, and all magic people know—and tremble to know—that in a breath, between one second and another, that Hand may close, and the shell of time first crack and then be ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... London was firmly established; men began to collect armor and relics: in this period grew up such an antiquary as Mr. Oldbuck, who curiously sought out every relic of the Roman times,—armor, fosses, and praetoria,—and found, with much that was real, many a fraud or delusion. It was an age which, in the words of old Walter Charleton, "despised the present as an innovation, and slighted the future, like the madman who fell in love ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... digestion impossible and finally bringing on its inseparable companion, the last degree of hypochondria. This misery is so much more lamentable, as it is, so to say, forced upon mankind from the cradle to the grave by the still prevailing and almost ineradicable delusion ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... system is not to govern by the acts or decrees of any one set of representatives. The Constitution interposes checks upon all branches of the Government, in order to give time for error to be corrected and delusion to pass away; but if the people settle down into a firm conviction different from that of their representatives they give effect to their opinions by changing their public servants. The checks which the people imposed ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... morning sun dazzled the eyes, the snow had ceased, the mists had vanished, the mountain air was so clear and light that the new sensation of breathing it was like the having entered on a new existence. To help the delusion, the solid ground itself seemed gone, and the mountain, a shining waste of immense white heaps and masses, to be a region of cloud floating between the blue sky above and the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Beethoven meant by his symphony, or Turner by his picture, was not something which you can name, but the picture and the symphony. Meaning they have, but what meaning can be uttered in no language but their own: and we know this, though some strange delusion makes us think the meaning has less worth, because we cannot put it into words. Well, it is just the same with poetry. But because poetry is words, we vainly fancy that some other words than its own will express its meaning. And they will do so no more—or, if you like to ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... of parting comes. We feel the hearty grasp, and hear the farewell words with which Scott takes leave of his American friend, and as with them our delusion wrought by the magic pen of Irving vanishes, we would fain slay the enchantment—too bright to pass ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... really was. This occurred on our arrival in town. He took long walks with me again daily and seemed so much stronger that I again dared to suggest the propriety of his returning to the mill, but to no purpose. He drooped at the very thought, and I perceived that his apparent recovery was but a delusion, I soon saw he was weaker than ever. But whenever he was at all able, he persisted in reading what he could understand and really his progress was a marvel to me. So it came about that one evening, towards ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... notice, also suffers from a form of the same delusion. When talking to a Frenchman, he employs a mangled cross between West Coast and China pidgin, and by placing a long E at the end of every word imagines he is making himself completely clear to the suffering Gaul. And the suffering Gaul listens to it all with incredible patience ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... Medicines.—The delusion that health can be restored by swallowing drugs is so widespread that we think it well to quote the following wise ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... the true state of matters burst upon Anthony. It would then have been perfectly natural and probable that, not foreseeing her misunderstanding, he should hurry off without waiting to explain matters to her. But that he should deliberately leave her in her delusion, and even use phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her and the audience,[1] would be, in a writer who professed to place reason above caprice, a rather gross ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... shall not find many to agree with me on this question of political meetings. Non-partisan let them be then. So we shall more readily find our way out of the delusion that national politics have any place in municipal elections or affairs, a notion that has delayed the day of decency too long. We shall grow, along with the schools, and by and by our party politics will be clean enough to sit in the school ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... fear that something of the kind has taken place here, and that I should have acted a wiser part, had I been contented with even the still small voice of a few partial friends, and retired from the boards in the pleasing delusion of success; but unfortunately, the same easy temperament that has so often involved me before, has been faithful to me here; and when you pretended to be pleased, unluckily, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... family and all that kind of thing. I wanted them to get on in the world. That was a lie, of course—a kind of self-glorification, too. Like most people, I suppose, I've lived almost entirely among delusions, and now I'm at the awkward stage of finding it out. I want another delusion to go on with. That's what my unhappiness ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... sagged in her saddle until the pain subsided. What a blessed relief! Carley had keen sense of the difference between riding in Central Park and in Arizona. She regretted her choice of horses. Spillbeans was attractive to look at, but the pleasure of riding him was a delusion. Flo had said his gait resembled the motion of a rocking chair. This Western girl, according to Charley, the sheep herder, was not above playing Arizona jokes. Be that as it might, Spillbeans now manifested a ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... rest of us. Fancy it! But for many reasons, change of religion, had there been no other, it was an impossible notion. "May be," thinks Hotham, "that the Court of Vienna throws out this bait to continue the King's delusion,"—or a snuffle from Seckendorf, without the Court, may have given it currency in so inane an element ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... that there were wiser men. But I found him not wise at all, though he fancied himself so. I sought to show him this, but he was only very much annoyed. I concluded that, after all, I was wiser than he in one particular, because I was under no delusion that I possessed knowledge, as he was. I tried all the men reputed wise, one after the other, and made myself very unpopular, for the result was always the same. It was the same with the poets as with the politicians, and with the craftsmen as with the poets. The last did know ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... lads might have to ''list' as 'sogers'; and last of all there came that grand excitement when—North and South, East and West—the nation rose as one man to demand political and Parliamentary Reform. It was a delusion, perhaps, that cry, but it was a glorious one, nevertheless; that the millennium could be delayed when we had Parliamentary Reform no one for a moment doubted. The sad but undeniable fact that mostly men are fools with whom beer is omnipotent had not then entered into ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... I know that I sinned grievously against my mother and the laws of virtue and propriety in carrying on a clandestine love affair, in allowing my heart to be deceived by his ardent protestations of love and even in my delusion going so far as to grant him a rendezvous—nay, ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... herbaceous object was of a ghastly gray—the emblem of vegetable death in its saddest aspect. Vulcan had driven out Ceres. In some places I heard a sort of chirruping sound, as of some forlorn bird haunting the ruins of the old farmsteads. But no! the chirrup was a vile delusion. It proceeded from the shrill creaking of the coal-winding chains, which were placed in small ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... from the District Attorney's office, and the rest of his communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to see him, and begged him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to joke him out of his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their motives, began to dread the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a guard on his lips. But the words he kept back engendered others and still others in his brain. His inner self became a humming factory ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... it not seldom said that ignorance is the mother of admiration. No falser word was ever spoken, and hardly a more mischievous one; implying, as it does, that this healthiest exercise of the mind rests, for the most part, on a deceit and a delusion, and that with larger knowledge it would cease; while, in truth, for once that ignorance leads us to admire that which with fuller insight we should perceive to be a common thing, one demanding no such tribute from us, a hundred, nay, a thousand times, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... men on the side of this superstition. Jean Bodin, so far before his time in political theories, was only thoroughly abreast of it in religious theories: the same reverence for the mere letter of Scripture which made him so fatally powerful in supporting the witchcraft delusion, led him to support this theological theory of comets—but with a difference: he thought them the souls of men, wandering in space, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... mare stood over me, while away to the right of us the hoarse tide of battle flowed and ebbed. What charm, what delusion of memory held her there? Was my face to her as the face of her dead master, sleeping a sleep from which not even the wildest roar of battle, no, nor her cheerful neigh at morning, would ever wake him? Or is there in animals some instinct, answering to our intuition, only more ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... sight of them sets one to moralizing. Like the beautiful but treacherous poppy fields which dazzle one in India, they are only too thrifty, too fruitful, too ready to yield up their heart's blood for the pleasure, delusion, and ruin of the people. We are all familiar with the broad, long, bayonet-like leaf of this plant, which is to be seen in most of our conservatories, known to us by the name of the century plant, and to botanists ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... delusion, my friend. Under Slave labor the South is growing poorer daily. While the Northern States, under the wage system, ten times more efficient, are draining the blood and treasure of Europe and growing richer by leaps and ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... be distributed in the form of wages, purchases, and industrial enterprises through the community at large, and that, other things being equal, the richest country will on the whole be the happiest. They clearly saw the complete delusion of the common assertions that the more millionaires there are in a country the more paupers will multiply, and that society is dividing between the enormously rich and the abjectly poor. The great industrial communities, in which there are the largest number of very wealthy men, are ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... the way delusion comes,—a glass of old Madeira, A pair of visual diaphragms revolved by Jane or Sarah, And down go vows and promises without the slightest question If eating words won't compromise the organs ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... more especially to have had him hear his sermon on the Duties of Young Men to Society. The doctor, meanwhile, was meditating on the duties of society to young men, and wishing that he could gain the young man's confidence, so as to help him out of any false habit of mind or any delusion to which he might be subject, if he had the power of ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 'Athenaeum' a series of papers in which he dealt with the strange treatises in which the earth is flattened, the circle squared, the angle divided into three, the cube doubled (the famous problem which the Delphic oracle set astronomers), and the whole of modern astronomy shown to be a delusion and a snare. He treated these works in a quaint fashion: not unkindly, for his was a kindly nature; not even earnestly, though he was thoroughly in earnest; yet in such sort as to rouse the indignation of the unfortunate paradoxists. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... spirit. [Sattva.] Fortune that first shows like nectar, and finally appears as poison, Chaining the senses to the world, belongs to the realm of passion. [Rajas.] Fortune that immediately and thereafter strikes the soul with delusion, In sleep, indolence, laziness, such Fortune belongs to ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... under no delusion as to the possibility of inaugurating a millennium by my Scheme; but the triumphs of science deal so much with the utilisation of waste material, that I do not despair of something effectual being accomplished in the ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... a fallacy and imposition, and a detriment to the Company instead of a benefit, circumstances (if they are true) which he might and ought to have well known, was guilty of an high crime and misdemeanor in carrying on the imposture and delusion aforesaid, and in continuing an insupportable burden and grievance upon the Nabob for several years, without attending to his repeated supplications to be relieved therefrom, to the utter ruin of his country, and to the destruction of the discipline of ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Babel, which I find in no Commentary, was first thrown upon my mind when an excellent deacon of my congregation (being infected with the Second Advent delusion) assured me that he had received a first instalment of the gift of tongues as a small earnest of larger possessions in the like kind to follow. For, of a truth, I could not reconcile it with my ideas of the Divine ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... you talking about? You are labouring under some strange delusion. Uncle Richard died of apoplexy more than six weeks ago, and lies buried ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... nothing. She tried all the lounges and all the corners, and found each one a separate disappointment. There was a fat, fair one, of friendly face, and beside her her grim guardian, a man so thin that you at once cast him for the part of Starveling in this Midsummer Day's Dream of Delusion. ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... this poor waif had bread to eat. You felt no scruples about marrying M. Fauvel. Did you tell your confiding husband of the lines of shame concealed beneath that orange wreath? Did you hesitate to confirm and strengthen his happy delusion, that his lips had pressed the first kiss upon your brow? No! All these crimes you indulged in; and, when in Gaston's name I demand reparation, you indignantly refuse. But, mark my words, madame, it is too late! You ruined the father; but you shall save the son, or, by all the saints ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... half disposed to believe himself the victim of some sweet hallucination, and was almost afraid to speak of the fancies that floated from time to time before his eyes, lest he should be told that his mind was wandering, and that he was the victim of delusion. ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... had gone out of earshot Sir Peter asked Lionel what his father would do if presented with a possible daughter-in-law so markedly frail? Sir Peter seemed to be laboring under the delusion that he had been weakly favorable to his son's inclinations, and that any other father would have expressed himself more forcibly. Lionel was saved from the awkwardness of disagreeing with him by an unexpected remark from ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... sweet delusion, Like birds the brown leaves hover; But it will not be long Before their wild confusion Fall wavering down to cover The poet ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... strictly warranted; a mistake to which scientific men appear to be more liable than others, the universe they work in being so large, and their universality (in Bacon's sense of the word) being often so small. But the delusion was not only pardonable, but desirable, in a man so zealous in the performance of his duties, and so much of a human being to all about him, as Bonnycastle was. It was delightful one day to hear him speak with complacency of a translation ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... doubt, the treasure was gone! In this extremity, her wit, her philosophy, her temper, her very breath deserted her, and she wept. She looked the picture of misery as the tears rolled down her face. Jonah and Ada stared at one another in dismay, each wondering if this story of a hidden treasure was a delusion of the old woman's mind. Like her neighbours, who lived from hand to mouth, she was given to dreaming of imaginary riches falling on her from the clouds. But her grief ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... had donned, Over his spirit came A dark, unholy change; Thenceforth he doffed all pity and remorse. From the heart of man delusion strong, Parent of evil, casts out virtuous fear. Unmoved, he slew his child a war to aid Waged for a woman's wrong Upon the fleet's behalf. Her prayers, her calling on her father's name, Her virgin youth, Those royal warriors held of no account. ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... was more serious than most affairs of Merry Mount, where jest and delusion, trick and fantasy, kept up a continual carnival. The Lord and Lady of the May, though their titles must be laid down at sunset, were really and truly to be partners for the dance of life, beginning the measure that same bright eve. The wreath of roses that hung from the lowest green bough of the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... indisposed to admit the products to their markets. And not only were the governments unwilling, but some of the peoples announced their determination to boycott German wares on their own initiative. None the less the nations were for months buoyed up with the baleful delusion that all their war expenses would be refunded by ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... ultroneous preacher boasts of his feelings; his success; his moving his audience; his reforming their lives; as if these demonstrated his call from God. On earth, was ever delusion carried on without pretence to, or without appearances of these? Let them, who know the history of Popery, of Mahometanism, Quakerism, &c., say if they were. Who knows not, that the Pharisaic sect pretended far more strictness, far more devotion, than the family of Christ? Who knows not, that Satan ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... the "male mind" (we have heard enough of the "female mind" to use the analogue!) is a fight, and his ancient military institutions and processes keep up the delusion. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... said the gentleman, and, approaching Frankl's ear, asked in Yiddish: "How long has she had her delusion?" ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... a good bed, which stood amongst many other beds in a handsome hall. Some one sat at my head; people went through the hall from one bed to another. They came to mine, and spoke together about me. They styled me Number Twelve; and on the wall at my feet stood—yes, certainly it was no delusion, I could distinctly read on a black tablet of marble in great golden letters, quite correctly ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... stuff might be used for low-grade varnish, but that's not what I'm out for. I've been trying to believe that a few of the specimens might prove better on analysis, but I guess it's a delusion." ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... relay work on July 1, but found the pulling still harder; and it was all that we could do to move the one sledge forward. From now onwards Wilson and I, but not to the same extent Bowers, experienced a curious optical delusion when returning in our tracks for the second sledge. I have said that we found our way back by the light of a candle, and we found it necessary to go back in our same footprints. These holes became to our tired brains ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... offense against your womanhood and our friendship—I would go and kill myself. But somehow I cannot believe that. I was beside myself—but I was never more exalted. Something greater than my own will made me do as I did. I think it was your love answering to mine. If that is not so—if it is all a delusion—there is nothing left for me. I have played my part out to the end. My work is done, and I do not see how I ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... they were in a dim, half-lighted conservatory. Tropical flowers bloomed around them, scenting the warm air; delicious music floated entrancingly in. The cold white wintry moon flooded the outer world with its frosty glory, and Rose felt as if fairyland were no myth, and fairy tales no delusion. They were alone in the conservatory; how they got there she never knew; how she came to be clinging to his arm, forgetful of past, present, and future, she ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... find a difficulty in admitting what is to us so plain and simple. We have a latent persuasion that we in their place should have been wiser and more clear-sighted; that we should have taken the right side, and given our assent at once to the truth. Yet in reality such a persuasion is a mere delusion. The persons who, in such instances as the above, were on the losing side, were very far, in most cases, from being persons more prejudiced, or stupid, or narrow-minded, than the greater part of mankind now are; and the cause for which they fought was far ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... knew him well. We had got acquainted some days before, and I thanked the boy for the name. It is an insect that hovers before your eye as you thread the streams, and you are forever vaguely brushing at it under the delusion that it is a little spider suspended from your hat-brim; and just as you want to see clearest, into your eye it goes, head and ears, and is caught between the lids. You miss your cast, but you catch ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... many luxuries—such as gravel soil, main drainage, electric light, telephone, baths (h. and c.), and company's own water, that you might be pardoned for imagining life to be so ideal for them that no possible improvement could be added to their lot. Mrs. Willoughby Smethurst was under no such delusion. What Wood Hills needed to make it perfect, she realized, was Culture. Material comforts are all very well, but, if the summum bonum is to be achieved, the Soul also demands a look in, and it was Mrs. Smethurst's unfaltering resolve that never ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... Dr. Wycherley, "my experience leads me to believe that some latent delusion is generally germinating in the mind, though often concealed with consummate craft by the patient: the open development of this delusion is the next stage, and, with this last morbid phenomenon, Incubation ceases and Insanity begins. Sometimes, however, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... delusion of an English existence, I had been tormented in my wakings with such thought-phantoms, and ever had I followed them, as an idle man may follow a flitting marsh-fire. Indeed, I had grown so much interested in the phenomenon and its possible ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... sarser at the end of every entertainment, the Dwarf never has any money somehow. Nevertheless, having what his admiring proprietor considers "a fine mind, a poetic mind," Mr. Chops indulges himself in the pleasing delusion that one of these days he is to Come Into his Property, his ideas respecting which are never realised by him so powerfully as when he sits upon a barrel-organ and has the handle turned! "Arter the wibration has run through him ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... have been presented in this chapter were, doubtless, well weighed by the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century, and brought them to the conclusion that Catholicism had altogether failed in its mission; that it had become a vast system of delusion and imposture, and that a restoration of true Christianity could only be accomplished by returning to the faith and practices of the primitive times. This was no decision suddenly arrived at; it had long been the opinion of many religious and learned men. The pious Fratricelli in the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... it, that, though the patient sees rats, or snakes, or what-not, as real-looking as the real things, and though they possess his mind for a moment, almost immediately he recognises that he is suffering from a delusion. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... all these terrible crimes, even cannibalism—were not casual, or due to degeneration or to the existence of monstrosities of the criminal type, as science, going hand in hand with the government, explained it, but an unavoidable consequence of the incomprehensible delusion that men may punish one another. Nekhludoff saw that cannibalism did not commence in the marshes, but in the ministry. He saw that his brother-in-law, for example, and, in fact, all the lawyers and officials, from the ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... Lidford in order to escape from her engagement, perhaps expecting your early return. I believe your pursuit of her can only end in failure and disappointment; and although I am ready to assist you in any manner you wish, I warn you against sacrificing your life to a delusion." ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... into thinking I do. As for the waste, the past is gone, at any rate; and the waste that I lament is the years I spent in working myself up to an undertaking that I was never fit for. I won't continue that waste, and I won't keep up the delusion that because I was very unhappy I was useful, and that it was doing good to be miserable. I like pleasure and I like dress; I like pretty things. There is no harm in them. Why should n't ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... if dazed for a few minutes, striving to think coherently, and master the delusion, under ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... very bliss was a delusion of my fancy, like the words, I believed to have heard, wrung from Harrington's breast during that fearful tempest, when we stood upon the deck of the ill-fated vessel, and death seemed so near us. Could I have ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... he is living in God's kingdom than the heathen do. And if you ask him, you will find out most probably that he fancies that God's kingdom is not on earth now, but that it will be on earth some day. A cunning delusion of the devil, that, my friends! To make us go his way while we fancy that we are going our own way. To make us say to ourselves: "Ah! it is very unfortunate that God is not King of the earth now. Of course He will be after the resurrection, in the new heaven ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... the officers looked east and west, and up in the air and down on the floor; but the search was in vain. The judge at last began to suspect witchcraft, and exclaimed, "This is a deceptio auris—it is absolute delusion, necromancy, phantasmagoria." And to the day of his death the judge never understood the precise origin ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... to which the hold-ups headed was a delusion as far as safety was concerned. They were never for a moment out of sight of the pursuers, and this broken country ended in a deep coulee. When the posse saw them enter this they knew that their capture was only a matter of time. Nature seemed against the robbers, for as ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... Was she clinging desperately to the hope of melting Michael Vanstone's heart? Mr. Clare could draw no other conclusion from what she had just said to him. At the beginning of the interview he would have roughly dispelled her delusion. At the end of the interview he left her compassionately ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... very extensive and awful delusion. To mistake the 'outward and visible sign' for the 'inward and spiritual grace' is a very general and fatal error. Of it's sad effects all religious parties have warned their members. It has done infinite mischief to the souls of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of course. The saying of words could never wipe away Rafe Gadbeau's guilt, any more than it could take away this guilt from Jeffrey Whiting. It was a delusion, yes. But Rafe Gadbeau believed it! Cynthe believed it! And Cynthe was no ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... perceive me yielding my heart to the first tenderness of the passion, watch over me, if the object be not every way worthy of me, my equal, my superior.—Oh! as you would wish to snatch me from the grave, rouse me from the delusion—save me from disappointment, regret, remorse, which I know that I ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... tardy retaliation with the Spanish Armada. Its naval inefficiency was matched by political miscalculations. Philip never imagined that a united England could be conquered; but he laboured under the delusion, spread by English Catholic exiles, that the majority of the English people only awaited a signal to rise against their queen. When this delusion was exploded and the naval incompetence of Spain exposed, his dreams of conquest ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... ride had brought warmth to his blood and a glow to his cheeks, he told himself he had been the victim of fancy. It was nothing; it was a delusion of the sight; a mere shadow cast off by his distempered brain. He was passing at a walking pace through Laxey by this time, and as the horse's feet beat up the echoes of the sleeping ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... will take Kamal Mani's advice. Why should I doubt my husband's heart? His heart is firm as the hills. I am under a delusion. Perhaps he is suffering in health." Alas! Surja Mukhi was building ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... state I passed about two months; and I now began to think I was to be adopted into the family, and was beginning to be reconciled to my situation, and to forget by degrees my misfortunes, when all at once the delusion vanished; for, without the least previous knowledge, one morning early, while my dear master and companion was still asleep, I was wakened out of my reverie to fresh sorrow, and hurried away even ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano |
