Quotes About Self-deception

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

You lie," he said. "All men lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so often that they almost come to believe it … though some small part of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show upon their faces.

All me lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so often that they almost come to believe it ... though some small part of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show upon their faces.

A toad grows wings and thinks he's a bloody dragon.

I remembered that, so I allowed myself to hope... perhaps I wanted to... we all deceive ourselves, when we want to believe.

You lie," he said. "All men lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one lie they tell so often that they almost come to believe it ... though some small part of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show upon their faces.

The thing about denial is that it doesn't feel like denial when it's going on.

God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Pride is the mask of one's own faults.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that worked on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn list of good intentions.

Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have ... the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality ... which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it. Then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

When our vices leave us, we flatter ourselves with the credit of having left them.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

Ja sam vidio u ?emu je takozvana borbenost nekih "borbenih" ljudi. Oni izmisle svoju "borbu", na silu joj na?u razloge, nadjenu ime, i bore se, bez rizika i rezultata, bore se – samo da ne bi morali misliti i raditi.

I ako nas niko ne prevari, prevarimo se mi sami…

A very wise person once told me . . . lie to anybody you want, just never yourself.

The heart lies to itself because it must.

An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and actually I'm just a sick clown and so is everybody else...

When you can't change what's bothering you, one typical response is to convince yourself that it doesn't actually bother you.

I know why people lie to themselves in life, but I'll never understand the appeal of the dishonest theater where the actor doesn't make some earnest attempt to include their own honest humanity in their collaboration with an author. It's so ugly to me that it hurts sometimes to see it happen.

Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.

I choose to do unattractive people, because then I can pretend they think they're attractive.