Quotes About Self-deception

Once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.

It's possible to pretend I'm someone other than who I am, and if I pretend long enough, I can believe it.

I told myself it was the snow—she couldn't possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It's amazing the sorts of things you'll make yourself believe.

You know what works? Denial. As a coping tool, denial is severely underrated.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.

I try to photograph my own and society's hypocrisy.

It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people.

We can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spirituality when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.

Ego got you thinkin' you're workin' somebody to your advantage

El más grave de todos los ´pecados´ es el autoengaño

There is nothing worse than deluding yourself and trying to make yourself out to be somebody you're not--somebody you're not comfortable being.

happiness blinds man more than arrogance

People deceive and play games with themselves. Lying to others is bad, but lying to yourself is hopeless.

There were times when one thought the opposite of what one really felt. That was very common, and this was an example of exactly that.

how could anyone manage to negotiate their way through life's complexities without at least a smidgen of self deception here and there? Alexander Mccall Smith Precious and Grace.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

when you didn't know what you didn't know, you could fool yourself pretty easily.

you didn't know what you didn't know, you could fool yourself pretty easily.

I'm just struck by how absolutely certain we can be about things for which there is no objective certainty. How stubborn. And how often we can fool ourselves.

Were all conning ourselves, one way or another, just to get through life.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

My life was one very long process of lying and lying again, to figure out how to cover those other lies.

When you're younger you're so happy to get some good loving you convince yourself you're in love, can't live with out it, and chase the dick like a crack addict after the pipe, or chase the bad sex hoping something happened to the man over night and the next time it'll be good.

We get so much in the habit of wearing a disguise before others that we eventually appear disguised before ourselves.