Quotes About Self-deception

I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others -- The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.

Creo que la primera lectura es la verdadera, y que en las siguientes nos engañamos a nosotros mismos con la creencia de que se repite la sensación, la impresión.

The efficacy of prayer consists in a cognitive-spiritual catharsis, which purifies man of the most hideous untruth and deception, namely, the pretension that he belongs to himself and that he is his own lord.

It is not in truth very difficult to befool a man who does half the fooling himself.

There is a saying, drawn from the ages of Old Earth and written by a council of Ancient Merican kings, that all men were created equal. I'd often wondered if the words sounded as false and idealistic to those men's ears as they did to mine. Truly, humanity has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

In plain English: people who lie to themselves make good liars. And good liars usually have more sex.

Do I really have moves like Jagger? F**king A, no, I don't. But I was going to tell everybody that I did and hoped they believed me.

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler — for the liar — than it really is, or ought to be. In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives.

To carry a false persona is an extra burden. Who needs that?

Even so the more a vicious man denies his vice, the more does it insinuate itself and master him: as those people really poor who pretend to be rich get still more poor from their false display.

ninety-nine per cent of the human race, no matter how smart they are, will do the convenient thing instead of the wise thing, and kid themselves into thinking they can somehow escape the consequences.

Liars begin by imposing on others, but end by deceiving themselves.

The mind controlled by lust has an infinite capacity for rationalization.

Because we are more adult than actually mature, we tend to take our sins and baptize them, dressing them up as spiritual maturity.

You have to delude yourself if you want to carry on in this life.

Memory, memoir, autobiography - lies, lies, all lies.

Ah! How we all love to be deluded! We have a secret dread of being thought ignorant. And we end by being ignorant after all, only we have done it in a long and roundabout way.

He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon. I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow. I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand lest a least hole should be left in this name; and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.

Clever lies become matters of self-congratulation.

A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.

That quality, I said, could almost be called suspense, and it seemed to me to be generated by the belief that our lives were governed by mystery, when in fact that mystery was merely the extent of our self-deception over the fact of our own mortality.

I'm not in a position to tell anyone anything about how to live his or her life, but I think it's worth noting that no one can lie to us as effectively as we can lie to ourselves. We know exactly what to say! And I do think that women, even extremely smart women, can be very, very vulnerable to men.

Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.

É impossível para um homem ser enganado por outra pessoa, a não ser por si mesmo". Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).