Quotes About Self-justification

the diverse individuals in the community are no longer incentives for talking and judging and condemning, and thus excuses for self-justification. They are rather cause for rejoicing in one another and serving one another.

A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat ... but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.

She had an ability, invaluable in a weak person, to persuade herself that whatever was inevitable had her full approval, and was in some measure her own doing.

Moral commonplaces are amazingly useful when we can find little in ourselves with which to justify our actions.

But the truth is, most of the things that change the course of our lives happen in fleeting unguarded moments; grief buckling us at the knees; fear shattering through us like buckshot; love pulling us out on an unseen tide. And finding ourselves in the grip of these overpowering emotions, we then invent reasons based on the flimsy evidence we have accrued why they have happened, trying to make sense of the insensible with armloads of self-justification

Every life is its own excuse for being.

Maybe I wanted to be crazy so I wouldn't have to go through the normal rationalizations and self-justifications of unfettered indulgence.

Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.

sólo las naturalezas inferiores encuentran en otro la justificación de sus actos, sólo las naturalezas inferiores encuentran las premisas de sus actos fuera de sí mismas.

ACCUSE, v.t. To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a justification of ourselves for having wronged him.

But the thing that makes me really messed up is the contradiction: when I'm not hating myself, I feel righteous and victmized. Like the world is so unfair.

I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled, and thanks to money and fame, I didn't have to go far to find them.

Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others, or for soaking in self-pity, or for a sharp anger that knifes up through the surface whenever something reminds them of what happened long ago.

Mercy. It didn't mean that everything was okay, could or should be condoned. But we can't move out of ourselves and our own self-justifications until we look in the mirror and know, yes, I, too, could have done this. Or worse. My anger at my mother. At Mama for telling me things I don't want to know.

We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness.

We don't need legitimacy. We exist. Therefore we are legitimate.

Egoistical opinion that a man is the king of nature was created by the man himself, so he can justify his wrong decisions.

I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards.

Everything wrong I've ever done has always seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

I find that people... very few people think that what they're doing is bad, and usually the people who think what they're doing is bad it has more to do with guilt.

Language is one of the only things that we truly share, and I sometimes used this joint inheritance to obfuscate and deflect and justify myself: to re-brand what was good for me as something appearing good for us both, when I threw around terms like 'the sharing economy' and 'disruption' and 'global resourcing.'

And since most of us have self-justifying images we're carrying around with us, most people are already in a defensive posture, always ready to defend their self-justifying images against attack. So if I'm in the box, blaming others, my blame invites them to do — what?

In the moment we cease resisting others, we're out of the box—liberated from self-justifying thoughts and feelings. This is why the way out of the box is always right before our eyes—because the people we're resisting are right before our eyes. We can stop betraying ourselves toward them—we can stop resisting the call of their humanity upon us.