False Hope Quotes

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

The idea of atomic energy is illusionary but it has taken so powerful a hold on the minds, that although I have preached against it for twenty-five years, there are still some who believe it to be realizable.

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

Hope is the most hopeless thing of all.

Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.

The point, as Marx saw it, is that dreams never come true.

Every innovation is misguidance, even if the people see it as something good.

[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

Despair is the only cure for illusion.

MacArthur told Truman that the ‘boys will be home by Christmas’. Truman forgot to ask, ‘which Christmas?’ They are still there today.

The experiences which drugs induce are as far removed from Reality as is a mirage, from water. No matter how much you pursue the mirage, you will never quench your thirst, and the search for Truth through drugs must end in disillusionment.

People told me, 'You talk about Europe like it's Heaven. It's not Heaven.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

In the first place, you shouldn't believe in promises. The world is full of them: the promises of riches, of eternal salvation, of infinite love. Some people think they can promise anything, others accept whatever seems to guarantee better days ahead, as, I suspect is your case. Those who make promises they don't keep end up powerless and frustrated, and exactly the fate awaits those who believe promises.

… much like the cure-all theory of patent medicine.

I was headed for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don't think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either. I'd come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.

Flattery will get you everywhere," Sam says, "Except, apparently, off a roof.

I was blinded by being a romantic person.