Quotes About Self-deception

Winston Churchill wrote: 'Most of us often encounter the truth but we usually pick ourselves up and pretend it did not happen.

I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.

Denial can be beautifulBut only when you're a fantastic liar

It is easier to lie to yourself than hear others tell you that tell you that you are a fool.

A lie twice believed is self decieved

The greatest of mankind's criminals are those who delude themselves into thinking they have done "the right thing." —RAYNA BUTLER, sermons on Salusa Secundus

We avoid what we do not wish to see; we are deaf to what we do not wish to hear; we ignore what we do not wish to know. We are masters of self-deception, of manipulating our perceptions. —Bene Gesserit summation, Wallach IX archives

Pero los humanos tenemos talento para engañarnos a nosotros mismos. El escepticismo debe ser un componente de la caja de herramientas del explorador, en otro caso nos perderemos en el camino. El espacio tiene maravillas suficientes sin tener que inventarlas.

We build too many walls to be honest with ourselves. -Allanon

Think about it. Think how it works. We deceive ourselves far more easily than others deceive us. Our false perceptions betray us. Our fears and doubts worm their way into our subconscious and cause us to believe what isn't necessarily true but becomes true through our own fixation on the possibilities.

Sometimes things feel real when they aren't. It might all just be nonsense you've persuaded yourself is something more.

Willfully turing aside from the truth is treason to one's self

Sometimes people fools themselves into believing things that aren't true. Sometimes that can be quite dangerous for the person. They see the world in a wrong way. They won't let themselves see that what they believe is wrong. But often there is a part of the mind that does know, and the right words can let it out.

A choice to betray myself," he said, "is a choice to go to war.

Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we're blind, all the "solutions" we can think of will actually make matters worse.

Of all the problems in organizations, self-deception is the most common, and the most damaging.

That's usually the case. Identify someone with a problem, and you'll be identifying someone who resists the suggestion that he has one. That's self-deception—the problem of not knowing and resisting the possibility that one has a problem.

the discovery of the cause of self-deception amounts to the revelation of a sort of unifying theory, an explanation that shows how the apparently disparate collection of symptoms we call 'people problems'—from problems in leadership to problems in motivation and everything in between—are all caused by the same thing.

There's something deeper than behavior that determines our influence on others—it's whether we're in or out of the box. You don't know much about the box yet, but when we're in the box, our view of reality is distorted—we see neither ourselves nor others clearly. We are self-deceived. And that creates all kinds of trouble for the people around us.

If I betray myself," Bud said as he backed away from the board, "my thoughts and feelings will begin to tell me that I'm justified in whatever I'm doing or failing to do." He

Self-betrayal is the germ that creates the disease of self-deception. And, like childbed fever, self-deception has many different symptoms—from lack of motivation and commitment to stress and communication problems. Organizations die, or are severely crippled, by those symptoms. And that happens because those who carry the germ don't know they're carrying it.

Mary, it is sometimes permissible to lie to others, but it is never wise to lie to oneself.

He who cheats others is a knave, but he who cheats himself is a fool.

No, love could not be some great heedless unchanging thing. It was shifting ground, changing balance day to day. A word, a gift, a memory, a failed intention. We are only people being as we are, she thought. Anything else is self-deception.