Quotes About Self-deception

En ese autoengaño, su genio deserta, su musa lo abandona. Se queda sin creatividad, sin esperanzas. Confía en ti mismo.

Truth is stranger than fiction because we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

When you want to do a thing badly enough you lie to yourself. You say the other people are all wrong. Well, soon after I started killing people I realized they were just fools and I shouldn't be killing them. But it was too late. I couldn't go on with it then, so I came up here where I could lie to myself some more and get angry, to build it all up again.

No man engaged in a work he does not like can preserve many saving illusions about himself. The distaste, the absence of glamour, extend from the occupation to the personality. It is only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort of complete self-deception.

It is only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort of complete self-deception.

a character exposed to those strongest of all influences: the intrigues, flattery, and self-deception inseparable from power;

You know, that might be the answer—to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail.

I became sensitive, or at least hypocritical.

The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord. Notice that I suggest for the prophet in a really numbed situation a quite elemental and modest task.

We lie to ourselves here. Maybe we are here because we lie to ourselves.

Es un típico autoengaño. En realidad, lo que queremos es prolongar la permanencia del estimulante afectivo.

the hardest lies to live with are the ones we tell ourselves. And when we actually start to believe them... well, at that point, there's no hope.

The truth may hurt, but it is never so agonizing as the dagger of lies we tell ourselves.

People get sick from ''not wanting to see''.

System 1 constructed a story, and his System 2 believed it. It happens to all of us.

we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

You lie to her, you lie to me, you lie to yourself. Blind girl blind you.

Maybe intentions are the lies in the dark we tell ourselves when who we are falls short of the mark and when we destroy our neighbor we can say 'I never meant any harm.'

He is most cheated who cheats himself.

Merton wrote, "Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: the false self." With his typical insight, Merton identifies the false self as the person that we wish to present to the world, and the person we want the whole world to revolve around: Thus

lies, illusions, and self-serving excuses that cloud our minds make us less able to give and receive love.

I cannot forget that I have forgotten. I may have used the veil so successfully that I have made my performance believable to myself.

Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.

We are so costumed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.