"Delusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hand—a lady's delicate white hand—so placed between the light and the deed as to obscure the spot on which he was engaged. The unaccountable hand, however, was gone almost as soon as noticed." The clerk concluding that this was some optical delusion, proceeded with his work, and had come to the clause wherein the Master of Draycot disinherited his son, when again the same ghostly hand was thrust between ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... darkness, by the silence, by the rush of his waking fancies, numbed his heart. He felt the contraction of his hair, which rose on end as his eyes, dilating to their full strength, beheld through the darkness two faint amber lights. At first he thought them an optical delusion; but by degrees the clearness of the night enabled him to distinguish objects in the grotto, and he saw, within two feet of him, an enormous animal lying ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... course, any well-bred horse wouldn't let a common, underbred person like Dan stay on his back! When they gathered him up he was just a bag of scraps, but they put him together, and you'll find him at his old place in the Enterprise office next week, still laboring under the delusion that he's a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... thoughtlessness often betrayed in attendance on public religious services; in the impossibility of imparting religious truths, with any degree of clearness, to ignorant persons, when alarmed into some serious concern by sickness; in the insensibility and invincible delusion sometimes retained in the near approach to death.—Rare instances of the admirable efficacy of religion to animate and enlarge the faculties, even in the old age of an ignorant man.—Excuses for the intellectual inaptitude and perversion of ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... a war with England by surprise naval attack was no doubt an element in German plans; but in 1914 this was negatived by the forewarning of events on the Continent, by Germany's persistent delusion that England would stay neutral, and by the timely mobilization of the British fleet. This had been announced the winter before as a practical exercise, was carried out according to schedule from July 16 to July 23 (the date of Austria's ultimatum to Serbia), and was then extended ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
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