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Disillusion   Listen
verb
Disillusion  v. t.  To free from an illusion; to disillusionize.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Disillusion" Quotes from Famous Books



... fancies that had held, or failed to hold him in his thirty-eight years; he recalled the women who had loved too little, the women who had loved too much; and, quick upon the recollection, came the consciousness of the disillusion that ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... after the necessary pause and with a gesture half of offering and half of disdain: "But who can call them well cooked if the tinning of the pot has been neglected?" And into this last phrase he added notes which hinted of sadness and of disillusion. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc

... accurate record of my own impressions, all the drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments, events and experiences it contains would have to be set against a background of that extraordinary vitality which obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort, disillusion, pestilence, starvation ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome

... on that portrait has Simon Perkins studied with exceeding diligence and care, marvelling, it must be confessed, at the taste of the Fairy Queen. The accessories to his own composition are in rapid progress. Most of the fairies have been put in, and the gradual change from glamour to disillusion, cunningly conveyed by a stream of cold grey morning light entering the magic cavern from realms of upper earth, to deaden the glitter, pale the colouring, and strip, as it were, the tinsel where it strikes. On the Rhymer himself our artist has bestowed ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... a new sound on the stairs, and swiftly, instantly, instead of glancing to the entrance, her eyes sought Ranjoor Singh's; and she saw that he had heard it too. So she sat up as if enlightenment had come and had brought disillusion in its wake. ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy

... before me for some grave wrong, and that I know their guilt. Having lost confidence in their own and other people's words, they revere my silence, even as people revere every silence and every mystery. If I were to start to speak suddenly, I would again become human to them and would disillusion them bitterly, no matter what I would say; in my silence I am to them like their eternally silent God. For these strange people would cease believing their God as soon as their God would commence to speak. Their ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... the less said about my connection with Master Willie the better. Our colleagues are already restless at what they consider my neglect of my professional work. They attribute it to the wiles of Nur-el-Din. They may if they like and I don't propose to disillusion them. You ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams

... interpreted to mean that Pascal was really and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's worship of nothing. His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal

... self-analysis; the end with the more sensitive or the less durable is dissipation or even death. Woe to him who places his faith in illusion—the only reality—and woe to him who does not. In one way lies disillusion with its pain, in ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... will be understood how terrible disillusion on such a scale can be. I had been thinking of the United States for so long as the home of the free and the easy that it was hard to bring myself to the belief that the police there were both peremptory and severe. I had thought them all Irishmen of the ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... result, and yet all were, in their way, affected by the sudden fall of mental temperature. Mr. Denning went to his library and took out his private ledger, a penitential sort of reading which he relished after moods of any kind of enjoyment. Mrs. Denning selected Ethel Rawdon for her text of disillusion. She "thought Ethel had been a little jealous of Dora's dress," and Dora said, "It was one of her surprises, and Ethel thought she ought to know everything." "You are too obedient to Ethel," continued Mrs. Denning and Dora looked with a charming demureness at her lover, ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr

... into the lives of others, struggled with their struggles, triumphed in their triumphs, and was beginning to see in everything, good or bad, its necessity of existence. Under ordinary circumstances one cannot see much misery without experiencing a world of disillusion and futile rebellion of spirit; but Ruth was not living just at that time ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf

... the kitchen in time to hear the question, and Rick almost hated to give the answer, knowing that it would disillusion them, and ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... of a number. As Bill had remarked mournfully, "It wouldn't be so bad if it was number three or four, but Five hundred and Eighty-two Van Diemen's Avenue is horrible!" We had given in to Miss Fraenkel of course, save that none of us had the courage to disillusion Bill's cousin. We still received from him letters addressed in his sprawling painter's hand "Wigboro' House, Netley Heights, N. J., U. S. A.," a mail or so late. We never told him of Van Diemen's Avenue, nor for that matter ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot

... against McVay, who could drag her through such a mire. He felt the tragedy of a high-minded woman tricked out in stolen finery, and remembered with a pang that he himself was hurrying on the moment of disillusion. ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller

... never have a disillusion! Say, wilt thou that we woo her, double-handed? Wilt thou that we two woo her, both together? Feel'st thou, passing from my leather doublet, Through thy laced ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand

... my explanation may disillusion you but it has always been my habit to hide none of my methods, either from my friend Watson or from any one who might take an intelligent interest in them. But, first, as I am rather shaken by the knocking about which I had in the dressing-room, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... dock. When it became further evident that not only was Naomi de Ruyter forgotten in the city of her birth, but that the very landmarks she remembered had been swept away, there was a moment of disillusion, not free from tears. ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King

... between the bubbling energy of youth and the steady energy of middle age. For, although Gogol was still young in years when he composed "Dead Souls," the decade that separated the two works was for the author a constant progress in disillusion. In the sixth chapter of the latter book, Gogol has himself revealed the sad transformation that had taken place in his own mind, and that made his genius express itself in so different ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... laughter followed this attack—laughter which found a smothered echo among the ghosts. The spell was broken; disillusion followed the exquisite thrill of fear; and all Lady Sarah's male visitors made a rush upon the guilty nun. The loose white robe was stripped off, and little Jerry Spavinger, gentleman jock, famous on the Heath, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... always close to his creature, Billy McLoughlin, heard of it. To him it presented another idea.20 To him it offered a chance to overthrow a political enemy and a hated rival for Miss Ashton's hand. Perhaps into the bargain it would disgust her with politics, disillusion her, and shake her faith in what he believed to be some of her 'radical' notions. All could be gained at one blow. They say that a check-book knows no politics, but Bennett has learned some, I venture to say, and to save his reputation ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... things nothing is more false than the glamour of Evil, for when on being drawn into it we sin, instead of the hoped-for delight we soon find satiety; instead of exhilaration, fatigue; instead of contentment, disillusion; instead of satisfaction, dust; instead of romance, the greedy claws of the harpy; and the further we go in response to this glamour the more pitiable our outlook; for the sweets and possibilities of Evil are extraordinarily limited. Can any ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley

... straits. Must he tell Bennett the truth? Must this final disillusion be added to that long train of others, the disasters, the failures, the disappointments, and deferred hopes of all those past months? Must Bennett die hugging to his heart this ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... surprised me very unpleasantly, Lydia. I do not think now that I ever had much hope of success; but I thought, at least, that my disillusion would ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... next morning, the tracts in her hand and zeal in her heart. At the very first saloon, she was doomed to disillusion. ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray

... not, would not the loss be most irreparable and bitter? Would it not be better to go away, having looked at it from the hill and having heard the saga of the firs, keeping his memory of it unblurred, than risk the probable disillusion of a return to the places that had forgotten him and friends whom the varying years must certainly have changed as he had changed himself? No, he would not go down. It had been a foolish whim to come at all—foolish, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... I won't turn into a monkey," she said, in accents at once of disillusion and disdain. "I did not know there was any such danger. I should hate to be a monkey." Then her eyes brightened again. "May I go and get them now?" she ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland

... at his disillusion. The young apostle was jostled out of sight in the bustle of the growing town. There was no room in it for idealists who were diffident and sensitive and stood on the outside of its self-absorbed activity bewildered by the noises of life. The stream of events was very different from the pages ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... builds its nest, and the mother smiles at her child, let us have the courage to be men, and commit the rest to Him who has numbered the stars. For my part, I would I might find glowing words to say to whomsoever has lost heart in these times of disillusion: Rouse your courage, hope on; he is sure of being least deluded who has the daring to do that; the most ingenuous hope is nearer truth than the ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner

... attitude of the previous afternoon was gone, giving way to mild melancholy, such a mood as is sometimes induced by the perusal of an old romance dear to the youth of one's grandparents. The experience of the previous night had some hand in this disillusion. Some of the dissatisfaction with which it had left him still hung about his spirit, and drove him on in a vague search for diversion. He stood in front of the City Hall and watched the open cars go by, then took one, almost at random, that bore the label of Evergreen Park. As soon as ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... was a man fifty feet high; the cutting open of the giant—it occurred in her version—pleased him immensely. Then when she had finished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that he considered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. She did not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him that she had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have said to himself "what made her lie to me about that chap?" By no possible means could he have imagined ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... been educated according to the European fashion and at twenty had married and lost the young nobleman whose name she bore, and had buried him in his family crypt in Moscow with the simple fortitude of one who is well out of a bad bargain. But she had paid her toll to disillusion and the age of thirty found her a little more careless, a little more worldly-wise than was necessary, even in a cosmopolitan. Her comments spared neither friend nor foe and Hilda Ashhurst, whose mind grasped ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... disillusion soon came; she could not conceal from herself that she had been basely deceived and abandoned by the man she loved so ardently. She learned that Bigot had been elevated to the high office of Intendant of New France, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... dreamy echoes concerning them, will not be for himself. You may think him, that philosophic archon or king, who in consenting to be your master has really taken upon himself "the form of a servant"—you may think him, in our late age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly chimerical being. Yet history records one instance in which such a figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain approach to the result Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole being was filled with philosophic ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... Disgrace malhonori. Disguise alivesti. Disgust nauxzi. Dish plado. Dishcloth telertuko. Dishearten malkuragxigi. Dishonest malhonesta. Dishonesty malhonesteco. Dishonour malhonori. Dishonourable malhonora. Disillusion elrevigxo. Disinfect dezinfekti. Disinterested malprofitema. Disjoin disligi. Disjoint elartikigi. Disjunction disigo. Dislike malsxati, malameti. Dislike antipatio. Dislocate elartikigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of this mood, is "The Newcomer's Wife," with the terrible abruptness of its last stanza. It is not for criticism to find fault with the theme of a work of art, but only to comment upon its execution. Of the merit of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... was herself a hero-worshiper, or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, "Too bad!" or, "I don't see how you keep- up?" and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing. She seemed to rejoice in keeping herself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... hardly less true, if we accept the word in its modern meaning. Raleigh's most notable verses, The Lie, are a challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life—the saeva indignatio of Swift. The same grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, The Pilgrimage. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are asserted in the MSS. or by tradition to have been "made by Sir Walter {89} Raleigh the night before he was ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... me, don't you? Never mind; let us pretend I'm Major Grim disguised as an Arab; only, I'm afraid we must continue the conversation in Arabic; I might disillusion you if I tried to talk English. We'll say then that I'm Major Grim, disguised. Let's see now... What would he do in the circumstances? Here's Yussuf Dakmar, wanted for murder in the city and known to be plotting a massacre, seen climbing a wall when the sentry's back was turned, and caught ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy

... Yet as time went on she could not shut her eyes to Sydney's habit of referring every question to the test of personal expediency. It was her first great disillusion, but the pain which it caused her was on her parents' behalf rather than on her own. They were the chief sufferers; they gave him so much and received so little in return. To be sure, Sydney was only what they had made him. They bade ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... remark: "Dear me! How stuffy this room is, and the shop's practically full of trash!" Or, some little time before they are dead, they stay later than usual in the shop one evening, and make up their minds to take stock and count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, and they struggle into the living-room and murmur: "I shall never have that beautiful furniture, and I shall never have that system of ventilation. If I had known earlier, I would have ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett

... I won't believe it! It's no good trying to disillusion me, Charmion. I've put you on a topmost pinnacle, and it would take a mighty effort to tumble ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... figure walking towards her, the more necessary it became to proceed, but she felt a deadly sickness of this road. She loved each individual tree, each bush and field and the view from every point, but the whole thing she hated. It was the personification of mistake, disappointment and slow disillusion, but now it was all shrouded in darkness and she seemed to be walking on nothing, through nothing and towards nothing. She herself was nothing and she thought of nothing, though now and then a little wave of anxiety washed over her. Where ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG

... producing the money and counting it, his furtive glance kept watch of Jack. Then, as the committee turned to go, he suddenly exclaimed with angry surprise and disillusion: ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... mean to give it to me?" I said. "I should like to have it very much. I should set it up on my writing table and call it 'Disillusion.' But do you think it ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... into the hands of traitors, eloquent liars, and vile hypocrites, and cannot escape without crawling in the dust—this produces a large deep gloom, and a crushing sense of doom beyond philosophy. Scudamore could have endured the loss and the disillusion of his love—pure and strong as that power had been—but the ruin of his native land would turn his lively heart into a ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... certainly ready—seated himself. This isolated action rendered him almost as conspicuous as his coat, which was also alone in its sombre glory. Presently others followed the stranger's example, and the meal began. Then ensued a period of disillusion. There was no punkah, the glare of the lamplight was blinding, and the food—all of it—coarse, greasy and cold. The soup which had been waiting was of the variety known as tinned, an old acquaintance which X. had hoped to have left in the jungle until his return. This, and other ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser

... that Otto Kahn sees eye to eye with me. The utter degradation of the fine old Germany by Prussia was a bitter disillusion of my young manhood. What must it have been to Otto Kahn? He loved the old Germany to which he was "linked by ties of blood, by fond memories and cherished sentiments." To cast her out of his soul—to range himself in the forefront of ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn

... suddenly at the duke, and the elder man winced at the expression in his face. He looked through the duke, through his veiled despair and disillusion, beyond him. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... his dramas gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness, the keen delight in life and in man, which breathes through Shakspere's early work disappears in comedies such as "Troilus" and "Measure for Measure." Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and foulness that underlie so much of human life, a loss of the old frank trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their gloom over these comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Caesar" ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... Anyone who believed Metamorphizer had salesappeal just wasnt all there. But why should I disillusion her and wound her pride? Down underneath her rough exterior I supposed she could be as sensitive as I; and I hope ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... stars and the pitying angels looked down on the fierce conflict of grief and love and disillusion with which her desolate young soul wrestled alone through the long, midnight vigil. How should she separate these two beautiful faiths which had been enthroned as one in the happy depths of her guileless heart, without perilling her very trust ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... full of brighter promise. There is something very touching, to us older men almost tragical, in the unbounded self- confidence of the young life that we see rushing to the front all round us. We know so well the disillusion that is sure to come, the disappointments that will cloud the morning sky. We would not carry one shadow from the darkened experience of middle life into the roseate tints of the morning. The ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... I wrestled with a memory Which knocked insurgent at the gates of thought. The crumbled wreck of years behind has wrought Its disillusion; now I only cry For peace, for power to forget the lie Which hope too long has whispered. So I sought The sleep which would not come, and night was fraught With old emotions weeping silently. I heard your voice again, and knew the things Which you had promised proved an empty vaunt. I felt your ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell

... young one, full of soft southern inflections, and an older voice, a trifle hard, as from disillusion. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... inquiry, I arrive at the place, make my peace with the gardener, and enter. My disillusion dates from the opening of the garden door. I repine, I find a reluctation of spirit against believing that this is the place. What, is this kailyard that inexhaustible paradise of a garden in which M—— and I found "elbow-room," and expatiated together without sensible constraint? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... revolting, loathsome, horrible; but it was too manifest to be overlooked or ignored; its vulgarity and horror forced it on her attention. For some time she stood spell-bound, paralyzed; but then she covered her face with her hands; maidenly shame, bitter disillusion, and pious indignation at the gross desecration of all that she deemed most sacred and inviolable surged up in her stricken soul, and she burst into tears, weeping as she had never wept in all her life before. Sobbing bitterly, she wrapped her face in her veil, as though to protect ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... beauties are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of anticipatory disillusion. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... who, abandoning the deductive construction of intellectual theorems, made an exhaustive study of the Chartist movement. It is greatly to be regretted that these lectures were not effectively published. Their delivery wrought a tremendous disillusion as to the novelty of our ideas and methods of propaganda; much new gospel suddenly appeared to us as stale failure; and we recognized that there had been weak men before Agamemnon, even as far back as in Cromwell's army. ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... really developed so successfully as it might have done; many believe that it finds itself in a cul-de-sac. But what is to be done? The experienced can see that many of the offered reforms are but the repetition of old mistakes which will involve us in the unhappy cycle of disillusion and failure. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if men everywhere are seeking for a sign, a glimpse of a scheme of life, a view of reality, a hint of human destiny and the true outcome of human effort, to be an inspiration and a guide to them ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... shook his head. It seemed to him at that moment as if he never could eat or sleep again, the disillusion was so bitter, his disappointment ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green

... author is well within his rights. But if he prefers unmitigated gloom in his representations of life, we on our part have the right of not taking him too seriously. Speaking of disillusion, two can play at that game. We must get over our too romantic attitude toward literature. We must not exaggerate the significance of what is presented to us, and treat that which is of necessity partial as if it were universal. When we are presented with a poor and shabby world, peopled ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... Promise. The book is the history of how they got on there. Naturally, from the circumstances of their start and the giddy altitude of Alberta's hopes, you will be prepared for its being, to some extent at least, a story of disillusion. Miss MADGE S. SMITH, who wrote it, says that it is all true; and indeed there is much in the tale that stamps it as the outcome of personal experience. This being so, I could wish that her attitude in the matter had been a little less uncompromisingly English. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various

... ready to tear to pieces, allowing them neither intelligence nor virtue—in just that there seemed to her some flaw of taste that was almost like a confession of failure. Surely she loved him, and was ready to forgive him much: not for worlds would she have confessed to disillusion. And yet, now and again, when the rush and ostentation of their new life, with its monotony of dinners and dances—so little like that which she had anticipated as the future lot of a painter's wife—had left ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... it for a while." Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay with it for a ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... Cornelius, whom disillusion had stricken into speechlessness at this revelation of the old Ned under the masquerade, sighed heavily and looked pained. But Philip, always curious upon matters of ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... the climes, the fears as the hopes, all the travail of deepest, fullest living, we claim as our own forever. We guard jealously our heritage of feeling. Would you for all the world sleep rather than wake, forget rather than remember? Then cease the requiem of your speech about the dangers of disillusion! ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... Whitaker spared him disillusion. Painting with Kenny was an occupation, never work. When it slipped tiresomely into the class of work and palled, he threw it aside for something ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... who insists upon mistaking you for the heir of all the Rothschilds used to cost me dear when I was younger. I find the best plan is to take him in hand at the beginning and disillusion him; sweep aside his talk of '84 Perrier Jouet, followed by a '79 Chateau Lafite, and ask him, as man to man, if he can conscientiously recommend the Saint Julien at two-and-six. After that he settles down to his work and ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome

... whose sympathy with the spiritual life of their respective nations was still a living force. It would seem, however, to be the natural reaction produced by a tremendous national calamity, under which the mainspring of the collective mind temporarily gives way and the psychical equilibrium is upset. Disillusion, despondency, and contempt for the passions that lately stirred them drive the people to seek relief in the distractions of pleasures, among which dancing is perhaps one of the mildest. It was so in Paris at the close of the long period of stress which ended with the rise of Napoleon. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... disappointment which this produced was greater than the Painters' Union could bear; so someone, in order to prevent industrial strife, invented some stuff called varnish, by which, at the very moment of disillusion, the maximum of shininess can be again produced with the minimum of effort. It is one of the few inventions which make a man grateful for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various

... face to face, and made acquainted, with her who for so long had seemed the object of a romantic passion, he felt a strange thrill of surprise and embarrassment. Those meetings of later years generally bring painful disillusion. How many of us can remember some fair-haired little girl who in our childhood represented to us the very incarnation of feminine grace and beauty, for whom we fetched and carried, for whom we bound nosegays on the heath and stole apples from the ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford

... quieter type of man who had no real love for the pomps and shows the rattle and tumult, of the city. The vision of wholesome country-produce—of fresh milk and eggs and vegetables, and of tender poultry—is one which still attracts our city-folk. But the vision, then as now, was often subject to disillusion. Complaints are many that you had to feed the homestead in place of it feeding you, and when Martial has given a pleasant picture of a family reaching the gate of Rome with a coachful of the typical produce of the country, he ends by suddenly letting you know that ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... such confidence that Oliver had a difficulty in choosing the words that were to disillusion him. Therefore he ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini

... soul aflame with hope and eagerness and tremulous joy, ready to burst into a blaze of happiness—and then came disillusion and despair, blacker ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... really the man who had made her suffer, weep, confide in Susan Fleet, in Algeria? Had pink roses and dust, far-off and near sounds, movements and stillnesses, and that strange little island spoken to her of him, prophesied to her about him? She had a sense of banality, of disillusion, as if all that had been in her own brain only, almost crazily conceived without any action ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... responsibility. In this regard, Sylvie Hermenstein had acted wisely by removing herself from association, or "blind contact" with her would-be lover,—and yet, though she was aware that her doing so had caused a certain dispersal of the atmosphere which almost veered towards complete disillusion, she found nevertheless, that Rome as she had said, was "dull"; her heart was empty, and longing for she knew not what. And that deep longing she felt could not have been completely gratified by the brief ardours of Fontenelle. And so she sat thinking wearily,—wondering what was ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... studying the exquisite delicacy of the face turned so wistfully upon him, and the lovely lines of the slim throat and rounded chin—"So beautiful a creature"—he was saying within himself—"And must she also suffer pain and disillusion like all the rest of her unfortunate ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... Thus disillusion had been her misfortune—perhaps it would be more accurate to say her fortune. She had built up, after each invasion, her defences more carefully and solidly than before, only to be again astonished and dismayed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... But the spiritual disillusion had come at last, and it had revealed him to himself at an awful depth of self-deception. Thinking in his pride and arrogance he was the divine messenger, the avenger, the man of God, he had set out to shed blood like any wretched criminal, any jealous murderer who was ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... found and well named. I own to that kind of candour you attribute to me: when I am frankly interested, I suppose I fancy the public will be so too; and when I am moved, I am sure of it. It has been my luck hitherto to meet with no staggering disillusion. 'Before' and 'After' may be two; and yet I believe the habit is now too thoroughly ingrained to be altered. About the doctors, you were right, that dedication has been the subject of some pleasantries that made me grind, and of your happily touched reproof which ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... in their Italian models. The Petit Jehan de Saintre is certainly the work of Antoine de la Salle; the irony of a realist, endowed with subtlety and grace, conducts the reader through chivalric exaltations to vulgar disillusion. The writer was not insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past, but he presents them only in the end to cover them with disgrace. The anonymous farce of Pathelin, and the Chronique de petit Jehan de Saintre, are perhaps the most ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... to worship you keep sternly at arm's length, that is among the other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my arrival—lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and affection so ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... doubt, that this was all very well before the War, but that in the Army a little writing would be a pleasant change after the day's duties. Allow me to disillusion you. If, three years ago, I ever conceived a glorious future in which my autograph might be of value to the more promiscuous collectors, that conception has now been shattered. Three years in the Army has absolutely spoilt the market. Even were I revered in the year 2,000 A.D. as SHAKSPEARE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various

... an air of disappointment and disillusion). Down't awsk me, Miste Jornsn. The kepn's naow clawss ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw

... disillusion them, recognizing that it must fail. She was resigned to being misjudged. If she could achieve success at that price, success would have been ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... keep a strict watch over himself will be able to escape the causes of disillusion, which lead us through fatal paths of error, ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi

... all Spain. Unaccustomed to manual labour, ignorant of the simplest principles of mining, poorly supplied—when at all—with the necessary implements, they rushed to the mines with but scanty provision even of food; fevers seized them, strange diseases attacked them—most of all, disillusion confronted them; out of Ovando's 2500 men more than one thousand died within a brief period, in the most wretched manner. Those who had the courage and strength to work, barely made enough to feed themselves, for it not infrequently happened that after the royal fifth was ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... in this hour of disillusion and humiliation that she turned for solace to de Cosse, whose touching constancy at last found its reward. It was not long before friendship ripened into a love as ardent as his own; and for the first time this fickle beauty, whose heart ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too great, the disappointments ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... he mused. "If only the child knew! Heigh-ho! I am kind, sometimes I've been good, and often wise. Well, I can't disillusion the child, happily; she has given ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... was something which he had himself foreseen. He had never really accepted Spence's theory that early disillusion had seriously poisoned the lifesprings natural to her age. Her awakening had been certain. He had warned Spence that she would wake! He felt all the exultation of a prophet who sees his prophecy fulfilled. But common sense urged caution. To frighten her now might ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... flesh, of his blood; when she knew she would not wholly condemn him . . . No, no! He could not. She honored and trusted him now; she had placed him on so high a pedestal that it was utterly impossible for him to disillusion her young mind, to see for ever and ever the mute reproach in her honest eyes, to feel that though his arm encircled her she was beyond his reach.... God knew that he could not tell this child of the black gulf he had ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath

... suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners and opera-boxes ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... once became interested in the views of a new passenger concerning the local politics of San Francisco, and he found himself utterly forgotten. The bonnetless woman had changed her position, and her head was no longer visible. The disillusion and depression that overcame him suddenly were as complete as his previous expectations and hopefulness had been extravagant. For the first time his utter unimportance in the world and his inadequacy to this new life around him came upon ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte

... in her mind when she opened her eyes; and the girl, under the impression of so disgusting a disillusion, remained for a while pondering and yawning, before making up her mind to exchange warmth and featherbed ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... social experiment. Some of them, discouraged, had returned to a "bourgeois" manner of life, some even to a "bourgeois" philosophy. Almost all of the anarchists I have known lost their philosophy and enthusiasm with middle age, and experience with the actual constitution of things, combined with disillusion regarding the ideal. Most of them had been hurt or broken by their attempt, but they all retained a certain something, a certain remaining dignity of having struggled against the inevitable, and had acquired insight into some of ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... silence of his brain he fought—fought against disillusion, claiming exemption for at least one woman from these sweeping denunciations—the woman ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... on. From bitter disillusion felt against everything in her world her mind chilled to analysis. Her mother loved her, she believed, and yet—she did not complete her swift thought; indeed, she looked quickly about in fear of her ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake

... was very fresh and pleasant to look at; he seemed old for his years, which were few; he had a range of interests as well as powers of expression. Did he seem just a little conscious of his tender age? Was he not a bit too anxious to profess disillusion? Yes, he was cynical about Belgians, also about France, also about the Foreign Office. I suffered him thus far with a certain guilty gladness. But the Intelligence Officer demurred grimly. He was a patriot and ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... reported from various parts of France. A Prussian officer, speaking French fluently, was among a convoy of prisoners at Versailles yesterday. The officer, on seeing some French territorials march past, singing the "Marseillaise," remarked to his guard: "What a disillusion awaits us!" ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard

... general, "It was a great day for the Allies!" The repulse of the German attack was a real defeat, for it upset all the confident calculations of the enemy, who from the height of Mount Kemmel had seen, first Ypres, and then channel ports, within his grasp. It brought disappointment and disillusion to his troops, who had been urged on to their disastrous massed attacks by flamboyant promises of success. The effect was seen in a renewal of German peace propaganda, which all the Allies had learned by this time to disregard as unworthy of the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... It rains. The Tarasconese hero salutes the Ashes. The truth about William Tell. Disillusion. Tartarin of Tarascon never existed. ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... the work of reconstruction! [He sits down on the row or two of bricks.] The young man is still off on his quest for adventure and romance. Life must be giving him a splendid bath of disillusion. I can see him as he returns, his tail between his legs. Now I am working on Sylvette—she, too, will soon be cured. [He takes a letter from his pocket and puts it in the hollow of a tree-trunk. SYLVETTE appears at the back.] It's ...
— The Romancers - A Comedy in Three Acts • Edmond Rostand

... say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We dress, we go out to dinner,' I went on, 'but surely we walk in a vain show. How good this asparagus is! I often say asparagus is the most delicious of all vegetables. And yet, I don't know—when ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith

... Disenchantment! Disillusion! Must each noble aspiration Come at last to this conclusion, Jarring discord, wild ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... impulses, and a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, that all is vanity. The search for an outside meaning that can compel an inner response must always be disappointed: all "meaning" must be at bottom related to our primary desires, and when they are extinct ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... chair, removing his feet from the railing. He was in his shirt- sleeves, and was smoking a pipe. The droop of his thin mustache matched the droop of his thin shoulders—and both indefinably but unmistakably spelled disillusion and discouragement. "It's grand, but I think it's too grand—for us. However, daughter says the best is none too good—in Hillerton. ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter

... is largely based on wrong and ignorant ideas, it must still be recognized that it is to some extent natural and inevitable. "How much is risked," exclaims Dugas, "in the privacies of love! The results may be disillusion, disgust, the consciousness of physical imperfection, of brutality or coldness, of aesthetic disenchantment, of a sentimental shock, seen or divined. To be without modesty, that is to say, to have no fear of the ordeals ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... dreams were succeeded by despondency and disillusion; then supervened years of impatient waiting,—a standing with folded arms when so much remained to be done, a time of despair, of restless suffering. But the Jew had acquired his franchise, and gratefully he remembered those to whom he ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various

... in itself is too simple for Mascagni's strong dramatic talent, hence the lack of interest, hence the disillusion of ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley

... process, while his course of study proves that he is striving to produce mental acrobats, relegating the spiritual qualities to the rank of by-products. His course of study shows conclusively that he thinks that knowledge is power. Once disillusion him on this point and his course of study will cease to be to him the sacrosanct affair it has always appeared and he will no longer look upon it as a sort of sacrilege to inject into this course of study some elements that seem to ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem to view my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, the Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... a finishing stroke to the disillusion. In all his troubles and perplexities the good Bishop of S— had been a rock to lean on for the ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... struggle arm in arm with the Freethinkers (Radicals) or even with the National Liberals, if we make ourselves their accomplices, if we declare ourselves ready for the same miserable behavior which the Freethinkers made themselves guilty of by entering into an alliance with von Buelow, we may disillusion the masses; we may push them from us and kill political life. If the Social Democracy ceases to be an opposition party, if even this party is ready to betray its friends as soon as it becomes by such means "capable ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... after this, he was quieter, more conscious when he drank, more backward from companionship. The disillusion of his first carnal contact with woman, strengthened by his innate desire to find in a woman the embodiment of all his inarticulate, powerful religious impulses, put a bit in his mouth. He had something to lose which he was afraid of losing, which he was not sure even of possessing. This ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... Do you know, Captain Lingard, how people lost in a maze end?" he went on holding Lingard by a steadfast stare. "No? . . . I will tell you then. They end by hating their very selves, and they die in disillusion ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... Another disillusion weighed upon my soul. Before I went up the Nile, I had a fancy of my own that the bank was studded with endless ruined temples, whose vast red colonnades were reflected in the water at every turn. I think Macaulay's Lays were primarily answerable for ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... not bring himself to the idea of confessions and disavowals. He could not bear to think of her disillusionment. He felt that he owed it to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion. "To turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me.... It would be like playing a practical joke upon her. It would be like taking her into my arms and ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... They are there, the disappointed ones, but he doesn't know, he doesn't know! He hasn't on his conscience the memory of hearts cruelly wounded,—wounded even to death. He doesn't in memory see the eagerness in a good friend's eyes die to disillusion, to hopelessness, to bitter, bitter sorrow. He doesn't have to remember how the life died suddenly out of a voice that had been tender and eloquent. He doesn't sicken with the thought that his hand has ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... an end. On the bed, stretched at full length, with his Grand Army hat flung beside him, lay the inventor, dead. A little round hole in the temple, from which a few drops of blood had flowed, told what remained of his story. In the night disillusion had come, with failure. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... and how during the closing struggle with the tyrant they also have been present. When the fight is finally over, they prepare to depart, taking it for granted that Krishna and Balarama will come with them. Krishna has therefore to disillusion Nanda. He breaks the news to him that it is not he and Yasoda who are actually his parents but Vasudeva and Devaki. He loads Nanda with jewels and costly dresses and thanks him again and again for all his loving care. ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer

... that type of the worshipping spirit exhibited in Aprile, and in the poet Eglamor, whom Sordello foils and subdues in the contest of song. The fame as a singer which comes suddenly to him draws Sordello out of his Goito solitude to the worldly society of Mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in Pauline, and exhibited more fully—and yet with a difference—in the Basil experiences of Paracelsus. Like the poet of Pauline, after his immersion in worldliness, Sordello ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... lingered, he glanced again; she was certainly a very pretty woman: there was the beautifully rounded chin, the short straight nose, and delicately curved upper lip, that he had seen in the profile,—and yet—yet it was not the same face he had dreamt of. With an odd, provoking sense of disillusion, he swept ahead of the coach, and again slackened his speed to let it pass. This time the fair unknown raised her long lashes and gazed suddenly at this persistent horseman at her side, and an odd expression, it seemed to him almost a glance ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte

... and lassitude of human spirit and the disappointment and disillusion as to the aftermath of the harvest of blood, may have aggravated, but they could not cause the symptoms of which I speak; for the very obvious reason that all these symptoms were in existence and apparent to a few discerning men for decades before the war. Indeed, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... from the British ambassador and the Langleys to the East Side club girls—brought up from New York in the special train—and a flourishing consignment of cripples and nurses. Here and there in her path Imogen might meet the blankness of a Miss Bocock, the irony of a Mrs. Wake, a disillusion like Mary's, an insight like his own; but the great world, in its aspect of power and simplicity, would be with her always. He had realized as never before Imogen's capacity, when he saw the cohorts of her friends ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... Nature and nothing else. Have I lost anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? Have I shut my eyes in pain—pain for disillusion? No—now I know that my home is not in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with her. Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe and love ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... the dismay, the disillusion, the nausea which ravaged him he was unwillingly conscious of fragments of thoughts that flickered like transient flames far below in the deep mines of his being.... "You are an astounding woman, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... and we old fools can no longer dream. We have only those phantoms called memories, which are the husks of dreams. Disillusion stands in one doorway of our house and ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley) although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who, perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... or make him human. One day, working in the garden, I laughed out suddenly, delighted with the whimsical idea of making him, almost in spite of himself, the deus ex machina of my little drama, quite soft and sympathetic under his shell of would-be worldly disillusion, as occasionally happens ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... house, groaning in spirit, but thankful that she had taken it for granted that he had secured their release in the manner indicated. He did not propose to disillusion her. It would be time enough to take the blame when the blame came along. Probably old Derek would simply be amused and laugh at the whole bally affair like a sportsman. Freddie cheered up considerably at ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... uttering these last words, that it would not have required the wisdom of one older than Miss Cable to detect that he was thoroughly enjoying his pose of man of the world. He was indeed young! For, he had yet to learn that not to disillusion the girl, but to conform as much as possible to her ideals, was the surest way to win her favour; and his vanity surely would have received a blow had not David Cable at that moment come out of the doorway across the sidewalk, pausing for a moment to converse with the man who accompanied ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... years in which he came nearest to despair. The strain of a great movement is not in the early days of enthusiasm, but in the slow years when idealism is tempered by the strife of opinion and self-interest which brings delay and disillusion. As the war went on recruiting became steadily more difficult. The alliance with France actually worked to discourage it since it was felt that the cause was safe in the hands of this powerful ally. Whatever Great Britain's difficulties about finance they ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong

... lady, quite at her ease, armed with eyeglass and bouquet and bustle, away went my dream of the slim blushing maiden. The Colonel is quite right, Lionel; the romance once suspended, 'tis a haunting remembrance till thrown again in our way, but complete disillusion if we try to renew it; though I swear that in my case the interest was deep, and the heroine improved in her beauty. So with you and that dear little creature. See her again, and you'll tease, me no more to give you that portrait ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... hand, I tried to look up; but it was in vain. The sting of sudden and complete disillusion had struck me to the heart; I knew my husband to ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)

... wickedness in the outside world, but never suspected that her own immediate circle, the nice people with whom she talked pleasantly every day, could be tainted; and the awakening to find that her friends cared less disinterestedly for her than she did for them was a cruel disillusion. Her first inclination was to fly far from them all, and spend the rest of her days amongst strangers who could not disappoint her because she would have nothing to expect of them, and who might perhaps come to care for her really. Long ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... young, curiously inexperienced. She had expected life to go on as dawn for ever. Everyday light had filled her with bleakness and disillusion. She had had childish fancies; that her husband did not really love her; that she counted for nothing in his life. Yet Sir Hugh had never changed, except that he very seldom made love to her and that she saw ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... image to my mind's eye that it became unnecessary for me to see the creature, and I ceased to look for him; then all at once came disillusion, when one day, hearing the familiar high-pitched laugh with its penetrating and somewhat nasal tone, I looked and beheld the thing that had laughed just leaving its perch on a branch near the ground and winging its way across the field. It was only a bird ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... speak. I could not then have revealed myself. It was all too marvellous, too hard to comprehend. The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of disillusion. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... us that the soul makes a natural response "to a world built on the same heavenly pattern with itself and aglow with the same immortal fire." He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on the outside of things. The materialist is ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... held her, which made all others seem trifling by comparison. The next moment, a new life was born into the world—a new life, with all its heritage of certain sorrow and possible joy; with all its infinite sensibility to pleasure or pain, to hope and love and disillusion. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... she had decided to fly, but the presence of Blanch rendered such a course impossible. The only alternative left her was to extricate herself as swiftly and gracefully as possible from her dilemma by making herself as disagreeable as possible in his eyes. In this wise she hoped to disillusion him, and it was with this intention she had come forth to meet him. She could not see him from where she sat, having turned her back upon him; but, judging from the length of time it took him to approach, ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... for whom it was impossible to feel indifference; one either hated him or became fascinated by his curious and peculiar charm. This quality led many admirers to remain faithful to him even after disillusion had shattered their former friendship, and who, whilst refusing to speak to him any more, yet retained for him a deep affection which not even the conviction that it had been misplaced could alter. This is a remarkable and ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill

... this disillusion that the idea took hold of Rhodes, which he communicated to his friends, to acquire the gold fields of the Rand, and to transform the rich Transvaal into a region where the Chartered Company and the South African League would rule. Previous to this, if we are to believe President ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill

... fiction, the first proposal comes in the nature of a shock. Disillusion follows as a matter of course. Men, evidently, do not read fiction, or at least do not profit by the valuable hints to be ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... generosity of many in America, and particularly those of German descent, has not been fully recognized or appreciated by the people of Germany. The total sum remitted to Germany for our Red Cross and other similar societies amounts to over 20,000,000 marks. The disillusion of our people at home when they realized the slight political influence exercised by the German-American element in the United States has led them to overlook their great achievements in the cause of charity, which were ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... a very silly toast, but let it go to please them—for why disillusion those who believe in ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris

... it may be occasioned by misfortune or accident. The parable of the Prodigal Son, however, shows that it is usually due to willful choice and to a desire for indulgence. Its results are sketched in appalling colors. We are shown all its disillusion, suffering, slavery, and despair. As a picture of the inevitable consequences of sin, no touch could be added to the scene of the prodigal in the far country when he had spent all, when the famine had arisen, when he had sold himself to feed ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman



Words linked to "Disillusion" :   disenchantment, edification, disenchant, sophistication, let down, enchant, disillusionment, disappoint



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