Disenchantment Quotes

“When love gets on a slippery slope, unawareness or indifference might be the underpinning of disenchantment and falling out of love. (“Amour en friche”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Animals walk around in a state of permanent religious intoxication. This is the natural condition of the mind and intellect, the moment-to-moment perception, of man as well. I heard some computer fool say that religion is the 'older virtual reality' experience, to justify his scam industry. No, the denuded state of the spirit and intellect, where you walk around 'demystified' and 'disenchanted' is the virtual reality condition, and a terrible condition at that.”
― Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Mindset

“It dropped so low in my regard
I heard it hit the ground,
And go to pieces on the stones
At bottom of my mind;

Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less
Than I reviled myself
For entertaining plated wares
Upon my silver shelf.”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems

“[T]he luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage

“Discovering that one is loved in return really ought to disenchant the lover with the beloved. 'What? this person is modest enough to love even you? Or stupid enough? Or-or-”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“When nature no longer enchants us, we must face disenchantment, the sense that the world has lost its wonder. If we suffer from the loss of authentic experience, it is because beauty has been commodified or simulated, and the sublime has become unreachable. (“Absence of Beauty is like Hell“ ).”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Well, I'm disenchanted, too. We're all disenchanted.”
― James Thurber, The Thurber Carnival

“Surely some revelation is at hand.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Life is illusion, disillusionment is destruction.”
― Karl Jaspers, Tragedy is not enough

“An argument ensued about abundance, leisure, work, nature, and what a second girl kept calling 'the American way.' When I asked her what she meant by 'the American way,' she said, 'Basically the destruction of everything--the world, your happiness, your soul, everything. The complete package. Evil and war. That's who we are, Mr. Countryman.' ”
― David Guterson, The Other

“But he got to his feet, his brows contacted in a frown. "You weren't speaking seriously?"
I moved towards the door, "It doesn't pay to be serious," I said. "It only means that people laugh behind your back, instead of to your face.”
― Nevil Shute, Lonely Road

“I became a communist because later on I was going to become a Christian.”
― Joy Davidman

“When I reflect, my dear cousin,' said she, 'on the miserable death of Justine Moritz, I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me. Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books or heard from others as tales of ancient days or imaginary evils; at least they were remote, and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other's blood.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune, such works always bring consolation, and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost.”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

“We must adjust our emotive outlook before drowning in bitterness and choking on despair. We must periodically weed out pangs of disenchantment and scour disillusionment from our hearts in order to console and replenish the depleted resolve of our spirit. Finding ourselves crippled by physical injury, weakened by illness, or left stranded in a vulnerable emotional condition brought on by grief, disappointment, and other physiological or psychological crisis, we must each examine our values and update our mythological mental maps in order to generate a source of stirred concentrate steeling a rejuvenated march onward. Perhaps our sources of revitalizing energy will stem from gaining a new perspective on ancient challenges, by establishing new hopes and dreams, or by delving a lofty purpose behind our efforts. Alternatively, perhaps we only develop the resolve to resume our scrupulous assault on the important issues of life by orchestrating a fundamental transformation of the self, a complete restructuring of our values and goals.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Hölderlin's sense of loss and destitution was not simply due to a personal predilection for suffering, but was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that arose from powerful currents seething under the Enlightenment—an increasing alienation from nature and a growing sense of disenchantment in the face of a triumphant rationality and waning traditions and values. Hölderlin was not alone in perceiving these changes and experiencing them deeply. Hegel, for example, famously wrote of alienated consciousness, and Schiller described modern human beings as "stunted plants, that show only a feeble vestige of their nature." Hölderlin, for his part, reacted to these currents with an almost overwhelming longing for lost wholeness.”
― Friedrich Holderlin, Odes and Elegies

“He concluded that nothing could happen, not knowing that human love and love of truth sometimes conquer where love of beauty fails. A little disenchanted, a little tired, but aesthetically intact, he resumed his placid life, relying more and more on his second gift, the gift of humour. If he could not reform the world, he could at all events laugh at it, thus attaining at least an intellectual superiority. Laughter, he read and believed, was a sign of good moral health, and he laughed on contentedly, till Lilia's marriage toppled contentment down for ever. Italy, the land of beauty, was ruined for him. She had no power to change men and things who dwelt in her. She, too, could produce avarice, brutality, stupidity—and, what was worse, vulgarity.”
― E. M. Forster, WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD Annotated book

“Do I jar you?" he asks with his sly charm.
"No," I say. “I am braced at every turn for disenchantment.”
"Well that might be just a little too bad,” he says.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“... Protestantism, in its quest for 'rational knowledge' of God's purpose and for an understanding of this world, engendered its own demise, for it lent legitimacy to a secular science that in turn rejected and devalued all religious values. And in this respect, Protestantism effectively devalued or disenchanted itself, for in its attempt to prove its own intrinsic rationality through non-religious means it affirmed the value of science, and with this laid itself open to the charge of irrationalism and to attack from the outside from 'rational', secular forms of this-worldly legitimation.”
― Nicholas Gane, Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalisation Versus Re-enchantment

“The young woman had read a good many novels, and
she had seen a good many films; this education by newspaper, serial and film had, in a thousand and one ways, blunted her sensibilities to the wonderful; reading about and seeing impossible events had prepared her to be un-astonished by the most improbable phenomena. All the same, her terror had brought with it a stupefaction, and the doctor's voice drew her from a species of torpor that came close to swooning.”
― Maurice Renard, Hands of Orlac

“لا وجود للسِّحر، فالعتمة الجهمة تنير عقلي بألف شرارة من ضوء.”
― خالد الخميسي, الشمندر

“The killer of life is not death but disenchantment' - in Shagbark, Story in Book of Dark Wisdom, The Magazine of Dark Fiction”
― A.A. Attanasio

“The waves of liberation movements from the 1960s have disenchanted us vis à vis ‘old-fashioned’ restrictive values but have also forced upon us new codes of thought and behaviour, summarised in the clumsy phrase ‘political correctness’ and the morality of uncritical respect for difference and diversity. (I lazily say ‘us’ and, of course, this is not true for everyone.) We have learned from psychoanalysis that whatever is repressed will emerge projectively later or elsewhere, often in even more virulent forms. Hence, in recent years we have seen waves of paedophile scandals, celebrated cannibal cases, serial murders, school shootings and mass murders committed by terrorists. The naivety of the nice peaceful Left runs parallel to the converse unbridled greed of bankers, internet criminals, drug dealers and pornographers. These trends might scotch any illusions of linear and easy progress but they do not. If Dostoevsky’s over-quoted ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’ is true, nihilism steps into the vacuum, and subsequently moralistic alarm steps in to call for a return to traditional values. But Pandora’s box will not close, every demon is now loose.”
― Colin Feltham, Depressive Realism: Interdisciplinary perspectives

“Most men are not kept within the bounds of moderation by mere admonition or even by example; it is absolutely necessary to punish them by disenchantment, by exile, or by death”
― Cassius Dio

“And yes, given our circumstances, in this post-enlightenment era of post-trust, post-truth, post-rationality, post-honour, and post-chivalry; as meaningless non-entities in a disenchanted and mechanistic cosmos, these actions are perfectly understandable. As Henry Corbin tells us, we are engaged in a terrible “battle for the soul of the world”, and it's a battle that we may even lose.”
― H.M. Forester

“In my exhausted state, it seemed to me that this aesthetic permeates all aspects of the world I have entered: narrative-free résumés dominated by bullets; motel-like, side-of-the-highway churches; calculated smiles; sensuality-suppressing wardrobes; precise instruction sheets; numerous slides.

It works, more or less, this realm of perfect instrumentality; it makes things happen: deadlines are met; reservations are made; orders delivered on time; carpets kept reliably speck-free. But something has also been lost. Weber described the modern condition as one of “disenchantment,” meaning “robbed of the gods,” or lacking any dimension of strangeness and mystery. As Jackson Lears once put it, premodern people looked up and saw heaven; modern, rational people see only the sky. To which we might add that the minions of today’s grimly focused business culture tend not to look up at all.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream