Quotes About Self-deception

It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.

There are some things that we know are just not as pleasant as the lies that we tell ourselves, and in that sense in order to endure existence everyone endures a certain amount of dishonesty in their everyday lives.

Cheating in school is a form of self-deception. We go to school to learn. We cheat ourselves when we coast on the efforts and scholarship of someone else.

In your mind you are cheating somebody, but in reality you are cheating yourself.

Cheating on self, is a paralysis of being.

I imagine it's always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren't going to, up to the last minute, until you do.

it's too easy to call people evil instead of their choices, and that lets people justify making evil choices, because they convince themselves that it's okay because they're still good people overall, inside their own heads.

Building alibis is a deeply rooted habit.

The indulgence of denying is by far the worst; it forces us to believe we are doing great things, when in effect we are only fixed within ourselves. To

Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it, and in the most pompous and pedantic way possible? Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?

Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible? Corelli asked. 'Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?

Uno nunca miente a la gente; se mienten a ellos mismos. Un buen mentiroso les da a los bobos lo que quieren oír. Ese es el secreto.

Ah, intellettuali. E lei voleva che ne assumessi uno. Perchè mai, se si ha così poco da dire, lo si dice nella maniera più pomposa e pedante possibile? Sarà per ingannare gli altri o se stessi?

Why is it that the less one has to say the more one says it in the most pompous and pedantic way possible?... Is it to fool the world or just to fool themselves?

In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

Una de las mayores fuentes de sufrimiento es traicionarse a uno mismo: sentir o pensar de un modo y actuar de otro, sabiendo perfectamente que estás yendo en contra de ti mismo.

The more you try to simplify things the more you complicate them. You create rules, build walls, push people away, lie to yourself and ignore true feelings. That is not simplifying things.

That "relationship" was a perfect example of Callie convincing herself of something that didn't really exist. She'd believed in unicorns until she was eleven, despite all evidence to the contrary, simply because she'd wanted to.

You'll have to ask Bill that, Sookie. And this is the only reason we're going? You're not cleverly using this as an excuse to make out with me? I'm not that clever, Eric. I think you deceive yourself, Sookie, Eric said with a brilliant smile.

Eric Schmidt from Google is one of my favorite mentors. And Eric would always say this very humbling thing that's really true, which is, he would say, 'Good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually do things.'

I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.

A woman in show business isn't honest with herself... so how can she be honest with another woman? We are, all of us, acting every minute of the day and night.

Takvi smo mi, rekao sam jednom Gambettiju, pravimo se kako smo za sve apsolutno osposobljeni, ?ak i za ono najviše i najve?e od svega, a zatim nismo u stanju ni uzeti pero u ruku kako bismo stavili na papir barem jednu jedinu rije? te naše najavljivane ne?uvenosti i neponovljivosti. Svi mi patimo od megalomanije, rekao sam Gambettiju, kako ne bismo trebali platiti danak toj svojoj neprekidnoj niskosti.

We never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggression and hypocrisy.