Quotes About Self-deception

And so, like many others, their honeymoon was a failure; yet they would not admit this to themselves, and they did not realize the significance of the failure until long afterward.

Most men think well of themselves, and this is self-delusion. Vain

My protective coloration isn't intended to deceive you, my sweet. It is intended to deceive me.

When the war heats up and we doubt that we will ever change, we must remember that our old person, filled with self-deceiving desires, no longer has power to rule over us

El talento es el medio más seguro de falsearlo todo, de deformar las cosas y de equivocarse acerca de uno mismo. Sólo poseen una existencia verdadera aquellos a quienes la naturaleza no ha abrumado con ningún don. Sería por ello difícil de imaginar un universo más falso que el universo literario, o un hombre más desprovisto de realidad que el hombre de letras.

A te lipsi de iluziile tale e totuna cu a atenta la propria-?i fiin??.

How easy it is to believe yourself a god by the heart, and how hard it is to be one by the mind!

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

In other words, it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts. The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts.

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

He never hears the truth about himself by not wishing to hear it." Pope Alexander

There's times an angel can't be trusted, or so many wouldn't have lost themselves.

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.

We fool ourselves into thinking we're strong then complain the rest of our lives crippled by the consequences.

I lost my second marriage because of drinking, and I loved the woman very much. But I thought I needed booze to write. I'm glad I was disabused.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

I have a very highly developed sense of denial.

No man knows it when he is making an idiot of himself.

A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.  

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.

Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.