Literary notes about Disillusion (AI summary)
The word "disillusion" in literature is often employed to depict the poignant moment when idealism gives way to a jaded reality, marking an intersection of loss, enlightenment, and introspection. For instance, Keynes ([1]) uses it to illustrate a complete breach of trust, while Santayana ([2], [3], [4]) contrasts disillusion with the blossoming of wisdom and partial human interests. Hardy ([5]) evokes its visual imagery to underscore a deconstructed façade, and Fitzgerald ([6], [7]) wields it to signal both a personal reckoning and the onset of a deeper renunciation of former beauty. The term is also used in Du Bois’s reflective narrative ([8], [9]) and in Dostoyevsky’s candid interjection ([10]), each instance reinforcing the idea that disillusion is not merely despair but often an indispensable step in the journey toward a more mature understanding of self and society.
- The disillusion was so complete, that some of those who had trusted most hardly dared speak of it.
— from The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes - If meditation breeds science, wisdom comes by disillusion, even on the subject of science itself.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - What guides men and nations in their practice is always some partial interest or some partial disillusion.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - Suspense between hope and disillusion.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating.
— from Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy - In a sense this gradual renunciation of beauty was the second step after his disillusion had been made complete.
— from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald - In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance of the labyrinth.
— from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald - My Days of Disillusion were not disappointing enough to discourage me.
— from Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. Du Bois - They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.
— from Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. Du Bois - But I must disillusion you a little.
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
