Disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition in our lives. — William Throsby Bridges
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. — Max Weber
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth. — Jean-Paul Sartre
Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were. — Brad Warner
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion. — Arthur Koestler
The disillusionment with our own abilities is, perhaps, one of the most important things that can ever happen to us. — Tim Hansel
Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm. — Murray Gell-Mann
No one is so completely disenchanted with the world, or knows it so thoroughly, or is so utterly disgusted with it, that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it. — Giacomo Leopardi
Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters — Francisco Goya
Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch. — J. B. Priestley
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted. — Arthur Miller
Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference. — Charlie Chaplin
In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. — Albert Camus
See fantasy is what people want, but reality is what they need. And I just retired from the fantasy part. — Lauryn Hill
In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. — James Clear
Short Disenchantment Quotes
A blaze first pleases and then tires the sight. — Samuel Johnson
In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends. — Kim Stanley
... many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. — Max Ehrmann
Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented. — Caitlin Flanagan
Enchantment Quotes
Light-enchanted sunflower, thou
Who gazest ever true and tender
On the sun's revolving splendour. — Pedro Calderon de la Barca
When at last I took the time to look into the heart of a flower, it opened up a whole new world; a world where every country walk would be an adventure, where every garden would become an enchanted one. — Grace Kelly
An enchanting harmony of fuchsia, purple and pink undertones, Radiant Orchid inspires confidence and emanates great joy, love and health. It is a captivating purple, one that draws you in with its beguiling charm. — Leatrice Eiseman
All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. — Pablo Neruda
Love is a flower that blooms so tender, each kiss a dew drop of sweet surrender. Love is a moment of life enchanting, let's take that moment that tonight is granting. — Dean Martin
God changes appearances every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises. One moment he is a glass of fresh water, the next, your son bouncing on your knees or an enchanting woman, or perhaps merely a morning walk. — Nikos Kazantzakis
My images are unashamedly idyllic and romantic, a kind of enchanted Africa. They're my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing. — Nick Brandt
Holy Istanbul! Your name is the most enchanting one of all names which enchants me. — Pierre Loti
A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do. — Lois Wyse
I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre. — Richard Foreman
If democracy is ever to be threatened, it will not be by revolutionary groups burning government offices and occupying the broadcasting and newspaper offices of the world. It will come from disenchantment, cynicism and despair caused by the realisation that the New World Order means we are all to be managed and not represented. — Tony Benn
As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. — Zygmunt Bauman
Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. — Tony Judt
My disenchantment? Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spellbound. — Robert Coover
Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it. — James Russell Lowell
Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity & disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. — Max Ehrmann
And who shall say--whatever disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic; or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold? — Thomas Wolfe
I wrote The Philosophy of Disenchantment, which is, I think, the gloomiest and worst book ever published. Out of sheer laziness, I then produced a history of atheism, The Anatomy of Negation, which has been honored by international dislike. Need I state that of all my children it is the one that I prefer? — Edgar Saltus
We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends. — Kim Stanley Robinson
As the style of Faulkner grew out of his rage--out of the impotence of his rage--the style of Hemingway grew out of the depth andnuance of his disenchantment. — Wright Morris
Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality—and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become. — Margaret Heffernan
All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The past in retrospect holds manifold disenchantments, failures and even tragedies; and yet the worse may be forgotten and the best held fast. — William Robertson Nicoll
As we have seen, the first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence arose around the question of 'self-defense.' In a sense this is a false issue, for the right to defend one's home and one's person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits. — Hermann Hesse
Beauty without intelligence is an illusion that is close to disenchantment. It is like a fairy that fascinates us, as long as we look at her through the enchanting prism of her beauty. However, it disappears as soon as the light of reason penetrates beyond the place where the eyes can see. — Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental. — Max Weber
The challenge is for us to reinvigorate the relationship with the Chilean people and to give state institutions new legitimacy. But this is also a universal phenomenon. There's also disenchantment with politics in Europe. — Michelle Bachelet
I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment. — Robert Hass
You know, there's a growing level of disenchantment with governing institutions in Brazil. And in a sense, it's a healthy development because you have investigators and prosecutors going to work and finding out these things and revealing them to the public. But as a result, you have a lot of growing distrust in the way that government functions in Brazil. — Simon Romero
In the event of a violent revolution, we would be sorely outnumbered. And when it was all over, the Negro would face the same unchanged conditions, the same squalor and deprivation-the only difference being that his bitterness would be even more intense, his disenchantment even more abject. Thus, in purely practical as well as moral terms, the American Negro has no rational alternative to nonviolence. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you search within your heart, you will find something there that will make it possible for you to understand: a spark of disenchantment and discontent, which if fanned into flame will become a raging forest fire that will burn up the whole of the illusory world you are living in, thereby unveiling to your wondering eyes the kingdom that you have always lived in unsuspectingly. — Anthony De Mello
To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love - namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness - this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear. — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik
Self-love is as protective as the Deity; Disenchantment is as perspicacious as a surgeon; Experience is as provident as a mother. Such are the theologic virtues of marriage. — Honore de Balzac
Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young. The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the the experience of love is so valuable it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment. — Irving Kristol
Men don't like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives - agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. — Saul Alinsky
The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by "the death of God" and of the subordinate god, Eros. — Allan Bloom
All about us the sense of disenchantment with technology appears to be growing. No one ... can ignore the fall of the engineer from the dizzying heights he once occupied... . with the coming of the environmental crisis, our relationship to society has changed. We cannot ... pretend that ... a hundred space spectaculars can restore things to what they were. — Samuel Florman
From the height of their disillusionment they look down upon those whom they despise as simple souls. For my part I have no sympathy with this outlook. All disenchantment is to me a malady, which, it is true, certain circumstances may render inevitable, but which none the less, when it occurs, is to be cured as soon as possible, not to be regarded as a higher form of wisdom. — Bertrand Russell
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. — Max Ehrmann
The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good. — Andrew O'Hagan
All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments. — Sarah Hall
Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love. Eros won't outlast duality. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. — Zygmunt Bauman
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. — Rachel Carson
In Conclusion
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