“The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers.”

#127-128
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Variant: Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.

A Glance Behind the Curtain (1843)

Bearers of the Black Staff

"Imaginary Homelands (1992)
Source: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
Context: It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere"… human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.

Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 14

Theological Lectures, No. 5, "Of the Immortality of the Soul", reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 514.

Knox on the Declaration of Independence. Reported in David McCullough, 1776 (2005), p. 83.

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 126