Quotes About Falsehood

The human heart" wrote Calvin, "has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.

That's the problem with lying. You can never remember what you've said.

I know a lie when I hear one.

These false pretexts and varnished colours failing, Rare in thy guilt how foul must thou appear.

The best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words.

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

Hence vain deluding Joys,The brood of Folly without father bred!

To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

Only false values prevail, because everyone can assimilate them, counterfeit them (false thereby to the second degree). An idea that succeeds is necessarily a pseudo-idea.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

It is disturbing to think that we carry our secret – our illusion – into the grave, that we have not survived the mysterious mistake that vivified our every breath, that, except for the sceptics and whores among us, all founder in falsehood because they fail to divine the equivalence, in nullity, of triumphs and truths.

The human mind, then, one might have supposed, was at last about to deliver itself from all the divine obsessions. Not at all. The divine falsehood upon which humanity had been feeding for eighteen centuries (speaking of Christianity only) was once more to show itself more powerful than human truth.

True beliefs are effects no less than false. In this respect magic and mathematics are on a level.

False thinking and false ideologies, dressed in the most pleasing forms, quietly - almost without our knowing it - seek to reduce our moral defenses and to captivate our minds. They entice with bright promises of security, cradle-to-grave guarantees of many kinds.

Until you repent and believe afresh, believe in a nobler Christ, namely the Christ revealed by himself, and not the muffled form of something vaguely human and certainly not all divine, which the false interpretations of men have substituted for him, you will be, as, I repeat, you are, the main reason why faith is so scanty in the earth, and the enemy comes in like a flood.

Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.

She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.

The falsehood that exalts we cherish more Than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.

I won't tolerate lying.

Rawdon knew better than anyone that Becky's promises never amounted to anything but a handful of dust.

Once a Big Lie was let out in the world, it seemed to grow on its own and needed little tending or worry to bend to the situation.

It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.

Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It regarded itself as gold, and was only brass.

The report of my death was an exaggeration.