Disillusionment Quotes

The Russian people are suffering from economic fatigue and from disillusionment with the Allies! The world thinks the Russian Revolution is at an end. Do not be mistaken. The Russian Revolution is just beginning. ~ Alexander Kerensky

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

Do you know I've been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn't believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusionment
still I should want to live. Having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty though, I shall be sure to leave the cup even if I've not emptied it, and turn away
where I don't know. But till I am thirty I know that my youth will triumph over everything
every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that could overcome this frantic thirst for life. And I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is until I am thirty. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My cheeks burned: with disillusionment, with the feverish afterglow of confrontation, but most hotly with embarrassment. I had perceived a closeness where none existed. ~ Kate Morton

Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving the disillusionment that follows when we wake up from our dreams. ~ Azar Nafisi

The main weapon of the devil is disillusionment ~ Sunday Adelaja

I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might be, after the initial shock of disillusionment, liberating. It might be a relief to quit maintaining the rigid pose of normalcy and own up to the outlaws and monsters we are. ~ Tim Kreider

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Every four years we go through the same cycle of hope and disillusionment. ~ Sheri Holman

Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could. ~ Lynda Barry

I lost something magical in the process of growing up – my disillusionment. ~ Bauvard

Nicholas wanted to believe in fairy tales. She'd read her share, hoping for miracles, but in the end, there was no hundred acre wood to play in with her little stuffed animals. There was pain and crushing disillusionment and betrayal. ~ Christine Feehan

I had spent the New Year's Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year. ~ Marcel Proust

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed. ~ Raymond Chandler

New black heroes were made and old ones dropped every day. ~ Mark Kurlansky

Elisabeth had not had her future and her parents had not had theirs, there was nothing to this so-called future which was always promised to the young. ~ Ingeborg Bachmann

One of the great sadnesses of modern life, because of our disenfranchisement and disillusionment with religion, is that we don't have access to these ideas. Yoga and meditation, for me, is a way of, in this secular world, accessing very very beautiful principles that would perhaps make us happier, at a time when people feel disillusioned with the economy, concerned about the ecology, worried with politicians, and don't trust what they're being told on television. ~ Russell Brand

We must help men and women see the epic in the ordinary details of life. ~ Matt Chandler

I guess love distorts our perception of reality, and it's even harder to recognize the truth when it's buried underneath layers of what we imagine relationships should be like. ~ Shannon Mullen

it is only experience and disillusionment that make me cautious. ~ Martin Gilbert

Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

They faced each other at opposite ends of an illusion. ~ Andrew Holleran

False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment. ~ Richard Dawkins

In comparison with all this, our little stories of achievement seem pitiful; Too well we know what bitterness of failure, loss, disillusionment, and ironic unfulfillment galls the blood of even the envied of the world! ~ Joseph Campbell

I don't want her to see how I had hoped to pity her -- how I had thought, maybe, I was meant to. ~ Constance Renfrow, "The Edge Of Happiness" Songs Of My Selfie

Occasionally there is a moment in a person's life when he takes a great stride forward in wisdom, humility, or disillusionment. For a split second he comes into a kind of cosmic understanding. For a trembling breath of time he knows all there is to know. He is loaned the gift the poet yearned for - seeing himself as others see him. ~ Betty Smith

All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I have, despite all disillusionment, never, never allowed myself to feel like giving up. This is my message today; it is not worthy of a human being to give up. ~ Alva Myrdal

The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next? ~ E. M. Forster

Disillusionment takes us to the question: what does it profit a man if he gains this world and loses himself? And disillusionment exposes that while we were supposedly serving the kingdom, we somehow became the king, and when we thought we were following Jesus, we inexplicably made him a servant of our dreams. The only real tragedy is the leader who never allows disillusionment to wear him to a nub and expose the godlessness of his busyness. ~ Dan B. Allender

If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment-still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The moon: in that luminous face one can behold those tired phases that bring only disappointment and no satisfaction; the impulses governing its expression remain patternistic, its cycles of transition easily predictable. With moderated temperament it commands the capricious sea: its diametric opponent, in whose helpless defiance, arises an empty, albeit elegant promise, an ever-changing flicker of reflected light, a simultaneous opening and closing of paths to be traversed, a vacillating hope and disillusionment in whose unsettling direction emerges something one might wish to call, even under the hardened visage of sky, a marginal sense of freedom. To walk upon the decks of ramshackle vessels rising and descending in patterns indeterminate, to lean in ecstasy over their shaky rails to witness the splendor of that which transforms immediately upon being witnessed and which transforms thereby the witness in question: it was these flights of reverie that appealed better to one's imagination than the lean pragmatism of predictable transition. ~ Ashim Shanker

Old friends, we say, are best, when some sudden disillusionment shakes our faith in a new comrade. ~ Gelett Burgess

Dare to change the world
There is nothing quixotic or romantic in wanting to change the world. It is possible. It is the age-old vocation of all humanity. I can't think of a better life than one dedicated to passion, to dreams, to the stubborness that defies chaos and disillusionment. ~ Gioconda Belli

Overcoming the blame tendency is a defining issue in the corporate world. Ben Dattner, a psychologist and organizational consultant, tells of an experience when he was working at the Republic National Bank of New York. He noticed a piece of paper that a co-worker had stapled to his cubicle wall. It read:

'The six phases of a project:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Rewards for the uninvolved'

Dattner writes: 'I have yet to come across a more accurate description of how most dramas play out in our working lives. ~ Matthew Syed

That disillusionment, moreover, like all other vogues, having had its beginning in the higher strata of society, had descended to the lower, where it was being worn threadbare, and that, now, those who were really and truly bored strove to conceal their misfortune as if it were a vice. ~ Mikhail Lermontov

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won't suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point everyone looks back – she will hear her heart saying, "What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage; the certainty that you wasted your life. ~ Paulo Coelho

Nostalgia is an illness
for those who haven't realized
that today
is tomorrow's nostalgia. ~ Zeena Schreck

This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony.

This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They a ~ Arved Mark Ashby

I ... allowed my memory to journey back to the days when I was a boy of ten, full of health and optimism, when my wonder at the great game of living had yet to give way to disillusionment at its shabbiness. ~ Ruskin Bond

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. ~ Ralph Adams Cram

If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called 'the spokesman of despair,' and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience. ~ Raymond Williams

A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve. ~ Junot Diaz

The devil sends disillusionment to such people who have the desire to do something for God ~ Sunday Adelaja

Olive Ann describes Sanna as 'a perfectionist and a worrier.' She is obsessed with the idea of finding happiness, and for her, as Olive ann wrote in her notes for the novel, 'happiness means being first with somebody, having perfect, loving children ... The theme of Sanna is disillusionment,' Olive Ann wrote. 'Her life is the pursuit of happiness and perfection, but she finds happiness and perfection impossible to obtain-her idea of happiness is constant joy, no changes. ~ Olive Ann Burns

I am ashamed and deeply distressed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles. ~ Wendell Berry

Pandora's Box could not be unopened, no one could return to Eden. ~ Selena Kitt

He was conscious of a cold and sickly thrill throughout him; and all he reasoned was this, that the young creature whose graces had intoxicated him into making the most imprudent decision of his life, was less an angel than a women. ~ Thomas Hardy

You know, when you see something from the inside, you see all the corruption. ~ Jeffrey Goldberg

I related to his disillusionment. Thinking that he was going for this big dream. Then he kind of saw through it all at one point and went back home. Then he started a bender, which I can relate to of course. ~ Woody Harrelson

Strike said "Huh" again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke. ~ Richard Price

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

...to experience a furious disillusionment with 'conventional' politics, a bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I expected so much from life and if I had not seen it so close, I would to this day be expecting something. What treasures I discovered in my own soul - where are they all? I have exchanged them for the world's coin, given my frankness, my first passion - and for what? For bitter disillusionment, for the knowledge that all is deception, all is brittle, that one can place trust neither in oneself nor in others - and I have come to fear both others and myself. I have not been able, along with this analysis, to accept the trifles of life and be content with them, as many others do. ~ Ivan Goncharov

I began illustrating children's books because of a growing disillusionment with the sort of work I was doing in the advertising industry. Book publishing offered me the chance to be far more creative. ~ Graeme Base

If we look at the life cycle of technologies, we see an early period of over-enthusiasm, then a 'bust' when disillusionment sets in, followed by the real revolution. ~ Ray Kurzweil

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. ~ Zeena Schreck

That's the way it is. If you believe in something your very belief renders you unqualified to do it. Your earnestness will come across. Your passion will show. Your enthusiasm will make everyone nervous. And your naivety will irritate. Which means that you will become suspect. Which means you will be prone to disillusionment. Which means that you will not be able to sustain your belief in the face of all the piranha fish which nibble away at your idea and your faith, 'till only the skeleton of your dream is left. Which means that you have to become a fanatic, a fool, a joke, an embarrassment. The world - which is to say the powers that be - would listen to your ardent ideas with a stiff smile on its face, then put up impossible obstacles, watch you finally give up your cherished idea, having mangled it beyond recognition, and after you slope away in profound discouragement it will take up your idea, dust it down, give it a new spin, and hand it over to someone who doesn't believe in it at all. ~ Ben Okri

The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don't want to go there. ~ Bart D. Ehrman

A SIZEABLE LEGACY HE LEFT her. It was a legacy of beautiful memories, of love and passion, of desire and ecstasy, of nearness and the myriad means of communication two lovers could find. It was a legacy of experience, both private and public, personal and professional, encompassing all she'd learned from their brief liaison. It was a legacy of pain, of hurt and heartache, of humiliation and distrust, of frustration and disillusionment, of the sheer hell of a loneliness made worse by comparison with what might have been. And, finally, there was the small gold heart she wore constantly, ruby-eyed and shining, a poignant reminder of that part of her own heart which was, now and forever, lost. ~ Barbara Delinsky

Sadness at that age had the pleasing texture of imprisonment: you reared and sulked against the bonds of parents and school and age, things that kept you from the certain happiness that awaited. When I was a sophomore in college, I had a boyfriend who spoke breathlessly of running away to Mexico - it didn't occur to me that we could no longer run away from home. ~ Emma Cline

Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction. Once we adopt an upbeat vision of reality, positive things will happen. This belief encourages us to flee from reality when reality does not elicit positive feelings. These specialists in "happiness" have formulated something they call the "Law of Attraction." It argues that we attract those things in life, whether it is money, relationships or employment, which we focus on. Suddenly, abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed and mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those whose homes are in foreclosure or who are filing for bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, are to blame for their negativity. The ideology justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress. And many of us have internalized this pernicious message, which in times of difficulty leads to personal despair, passivity and disillusionment. ~ Chris Hedges

There is no returning to the masses - once your forays into theory have borne you far enough away from them that you can perceive them and the benefits of being among them. the only return is through the process of disillusionment; one must cease to care about motivating the masses to be reunited with them. Likewise, there is no converting them - no matter how many people you come to join you at your outpost, from up close they will never look as impressive as the distant crowd. ~ CrimethInc.

It is not only in the field of religions but in all ancient studies that preconceived ideas are being uprooted on all sides. The religious take it harder than others because they are committed to a "party line" - usually so deeply committed that a major readjustment produces disillusionment and even disaffection. Yet the discoveries that have proven so upsetting should have been received not with hostility but joy, for if they have a way of shattering the forms in which the labors of scholarship have molded the past, they bring a new substance and reality to things that the learned of another age had never thought possible. ~ Hugh Nibley

Wisdom comes by disillusionment. ~ George Santayana

Love was a damaging mistake and its accomplice,hope, a treacherous illusion. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Disillusionment is not truth. ~ Mason Cooley

The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast. ~ H.W. Brands

Too often it's about what stands before us, not what stands within us. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment. The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go. ~ John Le Carre

There is no disillusionment about India as far as I am concerned. There could never come a time when I would get disillusioned with my own country. ~ Dilip Kumar

Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
(Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.) ~ Gustave Flaubert

Love may precede respect but it cannot survive the loss of it. ~ Joe L. Wheeler

And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold. You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken or potbellied. Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you. But you are not just that. You are accepted.' Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted. ~ Brennan Manning

Immersion in the scriptures is essential for spiritual nourishment. The word of God inspires commitment and acts as a healing balm for hurt feelings, anger, or disillusionment . When our commitment is diminished for any reason, part of the solution is repentance. Commitment and repentance are closely intertwined. ~ Quentin L. Cook

Nagging questions remain: Where is the line between making the most of one's potential and reaching for the unattainable? Where is the line between education as a tool and education as a kind of magic? The line is blurred and that is why when education fails, disillusionment is so bitter. ~ Henry Anatole Grunwald

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful ~ Michael Moorcock

The longer you stay in one place, the greater your chance of disillusionment. ~ Art Spander

She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood---a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would mourn her as if she'd died, because something had: someone we had created together. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

She'd stood by that creed. No softness, because the world wasn't soft; lots of laughter, because if you were in on the joke, the joke couldn't be on you; And no wanting what you couldn't take, because the world never gave.
Or so she'd thought. ~ Connie Brockway

You're nobody till somebody loves you," went the popular song, and we are an entire culture that has taken it literally. We maintain the fantasy that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed. But when our expectations and hopes reach that magnitude, as Becker says, "the love object is God." No lover, no human being, is qualified for that role. No one can live up to that. The inevitable result is bitter disillusionment. ~ Timothy Keller

Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist. ~ George Carlin

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life. ~ Harold Bloom

Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day to learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss. ~ J.D. Salinger

Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness. ~ Amanda Craig

There's truths you have to grow into. ~ H.G.Wells

On Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Sylvia's Lovers'.
'Philip Hepuburn worships Sylvia Robson, and finds dishonour' Sylvia Robson worships Charley Kinraid, and finds disillusionment. Charley Kinraid worships himself, and finds a career in the Royal Navy and an heiress who agrees with him. ~ Lucinda Elliot

The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. [Chomsky in an interview with Chris Hedges in 2010] ~ Chomsky Noam

Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

I've drawn this as a circle because the seasons will come and go. Joy always leads to another season of romance . . . which always leads to another season of trouble . . . which always leads to disillusionment . . . which always leads to more joy - if you hang in there. ~ Kurt Bubna

The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men's House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility … The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; they younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream - the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance. ~ Ralph Ellison

When it came time for me to go to bed, my mother beckoned me to her, and kissed me, and whispered, "I know I'll never have another anxious moment with my own dear laddie." I pondered these words before I went to sleep. How could I reconcile this motherliness with the screeching fury who had pursued me around the kitchen with a whip, flogging me until she was gorged with - what? Vengeance? What was it? Once, when I was in my thirties and reading Freud for the first time, I thought I knew. I am not so sure I know now. But what I knew then was that nobody - not even my mother - was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface. ~ Robertson Davies

We lost faith in authority in the '50s, up to a point, and we spawned a lot of anti-heroes in movies, which were refreshing and open. But at this point, with the distrust that's there and the disillusionment with leadership that is so acute, we need some kind of a focus on taking the irony out and taking the anti-hero element away. ~ Brendan Gleeson

I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real. ~ Oscar Wilde

The eternal raison d'etre of America is in its being the "sweet land of liberty". Should a land so dreamed into existence, so degenerate through material prosperity as to become what its European critics, with too much justice, have scornfully renamed it the "Land of the Dollar" - such a development will be one of the sorriest conclusions of history, and the most colossal disillusionment that has ever happened to mankind. ~ Frank Norris

Aid my disillusionment, my friend! ~ Herman Melville

Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments. ~ Hector Berlioz

Ask the river about it, my friend! Listen to it, laugh about it! Do you then really think that you have committed your follies in order to spare your son them? Can you then protect your son from Samsara? How? Through instruction, through prayers, through exhortation? My dear friend, have you forgotten that instructive story about Siddhartha, the Brahmin's son, whiuch you once told me here? Who protected Siddhartha the Samana from Samsara, from sin, greed and folly? Could his father's piety, his teacher's exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiing himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest. ~ Hermann Hesse

Avoiding moments of disillusionment ...
I don't want dates on my calendar ...
If it comes to love.
I do not want to hear any more cute songs.
I do not want to see or send any flowers.
Tell love not to touch my door.
I'm not home.
And please don't come back tomorrow.
I'm on vacation, a vacation away from love.
Say goodbye for me.
Love knows my reasons ... ~ Jose N Harris

Disillusionment means having no more misconceptions, false impressions, and false judgments in life; it means being free from these deceptions. Refusing to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering of human life. ~ Oswald Chambers