Quotes About Self-deception

The more you talk to yourself, the more apt you are to lie.

Don't fool yourself, my dear. You're much worse than a bitch. You're a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable.

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

Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

I have tried hard to punish myself for that, and certain other things. No more. Let the Outsider punish me; we deceive ourselves when we think that we can measure out justice to ourselves. I wanted to end my guilt. What was just about that? I should feel guilty. I deserve it.

They were all thoroughly bad people of the type to which I myself belong—that is to say, bad people who are pleased to think themselves good.

The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.

Arthur would so gladly have persuaded himself that he had done no harm! And if no one had told him the contrary, he could have persuaded himself so much better. Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences—out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused: there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon.

The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

Denial is always a prison.

people here have become the people they're pretending to be.

Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.

Certaines gens, plantés devant leur miroir, croient qu'ils réfléchissent, alors que c'est le contraire.

I nodded yes. Another deceit. I have become a person I do not care for.

All the time, I was trying to despise you--trying to prove you were the tramp that I believed. And yet at the same time I knew that if I was separated from you, I'd bleed to death.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, and contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves." —BLAISE PASCAL

A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

También conseguimos engañar a nuestra memoria. A fuerza de repetirnos lo que hubiéramos debido hacer, termina por parecernos imposible no haberlo hecho.

It makes you wonder. How much you can know about a thing, a person. If you can know anything at all. Maybe no one's who we think they are. No one. Makes you doubt yourself, wonder if you even know yourself or if you've been lyin, too, along with everybody else.

I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.