Quotes About Self-deception

the mystery of love bespeaks another mystery—the mystery of God. If we refuse to ascribe the name of God to the mystery of love, we shall remain in the throes of endless self-deception. Which means that melancholia cannot but be deeply, inherently religious. It has its human players and counterplayers, yet, in the end, it always comes down to one's personal experience of the mystery, the uncanniness of love. And there is nothing more uncanny than a love that has no knowable boundaries.

I am cuckolding myself

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Life is only as meaningful as you fool yourself into thinking it is.

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

Life is what you allow yourself not to see.

Everybody wants to lie to himself, pretending that there's something else besides only the normal life you're living in.

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.

Oh crap,' she said, as Apostil became more demanding. 'I did that thing where I was drunkenly utterly convinced I was sober.

I do this to feign confidence, because the more I fake it, the more it's supposed to feel true.

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. —From Long Day's Journey into Night, by Eugene O'Neill

Even Christians taking in the teaching of the Bible can be deceived about our own sins. We somehow feel that consent to the teaching of scripture is equivalent to obedience.

Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again— words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!

You can deceive yourself with truth too. That's an even more dangerous dream.

We called one's lifestyle a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation... We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives.

was a gunner's mate," said Marty. It was a lie. He had really been a chief yeoman at the time of the mutiny. But he thought now, always, that he had been a gunner's mate. "Ah. I thought you were a first-class yeoman," Karkov said. "I always get my facts wrong. It is the mark of the journalist.

His rage began to thin as he exaggerated more and more and spread his scorn and contempt so widely and unjustly that he could no longer believe in it himself

The search for spirituality is, first of all, a search for reality, for honesty, for true speaking and true thinking. At least from the time of the Delphic oracle's first admonition, Know thyself, the arch-foe of spirituality has been recognized to be "denial"—the self-deception that rejects self by attempting to repudiate the essential paradox that is our human be-ing.

Many people, not least those people who come to therapy, convince themselves that there are alternative options to choose where none exist.

You're lying to yourself again. You wanted to get rid of them. Their contempt and disgust aren't pleasant company. You're glad they're gone.

The human heart is so steeped in self-deception that it can easily outrun its own lies. It can use even meticulous honesty as a form of dishonesty, a way of saying to God, "Look how honest I am.

Just dismissing them gave me a kind of power over them. That was the whole method of the con, even when I was conning myself. These

We have our version. We even tell ourselves convincing little fictions that it's okay to hate those other people because they're the ones who are really filled with hate. We make ourselves judges.