deluded

If I have attached anything to sacrifice other than loss, I have at some level assumed a pay-off. And if I__e assumed a pay-off, I__ only assuming a sacrifice.

Don't allow yourself to be fooled by how "nice" a person appears to be, measure a person's virtuousness by the way in which they treat others with their words and actions .

It is for the good of states that men should be deluded by religion.

I have, he went on, betrayed myself withbelief, deluded myself with lovetricked myself with sex.the bottle is damned faithful, he said,the bottle will not lie

I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?

What insanity would lead me to believe that I possess the power, much less the aptitude to manipulate all of the consequences out of all of my decisions?

Don't create unbelief or doubt in people's minds. When you do so you ruin their lives and you have nothing to give them in its place. It's ok if people delude themselves those delusions keep their day running.

I constantly pack my pockets full of worthless trinkets, and in such misguided gorging I leave my heart empty and my soul emaciated because I have forgotten everything but trinkets.

Once the people have been deluded into believing that speeches and voting are the only acceptable tools by which to affect change in their nation, those who are in control no longer need to worry about any significant challenge to their power.

My rather arrogant attitude deludes me into believing that my ability to understand something is the criteria for its legitimacy. And if there__ one thing in my life that I don__ understand yet I allow to be legitimate, thinking this way would most certainly be it.