Escapism Quotes
A curated collection of the best quotes about Escapism.
Top Quotes
“Philosophical pessimism”
“The foolish read to escape reality; the wise surrender to it.”
“Wikipedia: Escapism”
“Wiktionary: Escapism”
“With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.”
“It is all escapism to feel dependent. By such an attitude you just lame yourself... The right way is your own way, and you should make yourself go on that way.”
“To escape one's virtues.—What of a thinker who does not occasionally know how to escape his own virtues? Is he supposed to be more than a moral being?”
“A horse is the projection of peoples' dreams about themselves - strong, powerful, beautiful - and it has the capability of giving us escape from our mundane existence.”
“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
“They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.”
“A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities.”
“Faced with problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility: escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. But today, I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.”
“And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational, and that there is no loophole - no escape from reason and reality. Their resentment is the cornered Dionysian element baring its teeth.”
“Science ... cannot conceive of any means of achieving that escape from desires we call "contentment" otherwise than through the satisfaction of those desires; it has not yet learnt that there is no limit to the multiplication of desires, nor that, since different people's desires are often mutually incompatible, an indefinite multiplication of desires increases conflict as well as discontent.”
“The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
“Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.”
“All literature, but especially literature of the weird and the fantastic, is a cave where both readers and writers hide from life. (Which is exactly why so many parents and teachers, spotting a teenager with a collection of stories by Lovecraft, Bloch, or Clark Ashton Smith, are apt to cry, “Why are you reading that useless junk?”) It is in just such caves—such places of refuge—that we lick our wounds and prepare for the next battle out in the real world.”
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.”
“The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They ask to be deceived. What Stresemann said of the Germans is true of the frustrated in general: "They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion."”