Disenchantment Quotes

“Processes of rationalization and disenchantment engender a shift from a social order founded upon value-rational beliefs and governed through charismatic and traditional forms of authority, to an order ruled by the force of instrumental reason and dominated by new forms of institutional bureaucracy. This movement results in the depersonalization of the social world: instrumental calculation steadily suppresses the passionate pursuit of ultimate values, and bureaucracy reduces the scope for individual initiative and personal fulfillment... instrumental reason... is not only tied to the devaluation or disenchantment of the highest and most sublime values and ideals, but places important limits on the scope for individual autonomy and freedom in the modern world.”

“Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.”

“Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.”

“Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.”

“Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth and none or almost none for the disenchantments of age.”

“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.”

“The past in retrospect holds manifold disenchantments failures and even tragedies and yet the worse may be forgotten and the best held fast.”

“We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.”

“All I have is a life's worth of school days. What came before school I can't remember. You can only sketch so many desks and teachers and chalkboards. You can only come home to so many dinners and homework assignments and nights of taking the garbage out. You can only go to so many museum field trips before you start to wonder, Is this it?”

“The enchantments of the past must always become the disenchantments of the future. But memory, a preservative, may intervene. The embalmer of original enchantments, it is the only human faculty that can outwit the advance of chronological time. Art, the embalmer of memory, is the only human vocation in which the time regained by memory can be permanently fixed.”