Quotes About Self-deception

It's much easier to get over someone if you can delude yourself into thinking you never really cared that much.

In fact, we humans have a fatal tendency to try to adjust the truth to fit our desires rather than adjusting our desires to fit the truth.

Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting.

The truth is nobody here is as stupid or evil as I let on. Except me.

Deception and self-deception are intimately intertwined. We fool ourselves in order to fool others, and we fool others in order to fool ourselves.

And I told myself that lie, all the way to my home.

That last part wasn't true, and he sort of knew it, but if you can't lie to yourself, who can you lie to?

We attribute to ourselves qualities that we do not possess because if we possessed them, our lives would exactly mirror our image of ourselves. Our lies about what is really happening in our lives are what we use to "patch up" our ego with rationalizations and justifications, all of which conceal from us the fact that we cannot really do anything because we have no Being.

Is there anything sadder than losers telling themselves that they're fortunate?

They think they're the only ones who understand the real truth about the world, and that it's everyone else who's been tricked. . . . The biggest problem we have is that people like to fool themselves into thinking that they could never be fooled.

So I'd stabbed needles into my eyes and pretended not to see certain things. Bad things. Only by turning my back on certain thing, I ended up turning my back on my dearest friend, a betrayal I never intended. Or so I told myself. That was the problem with lying to yourself. Sometimes you got too good.

Most of us are aware of and pretend to detest the barefaced instances of that hypocrisy by which men deceive others, but few of us are upon our guard or see that more fatal hypocrisy by which we deceive and over-reach our own hearts.

Denial,they say, stands for"Don't even notice I am lying." Human beings are the only animals who are happily lied to by our own minds about what is actually happening around us.

The path of truth is profound—and so are the obstacles and possibilities for self-deception.

Self-deception is a constant problem as we progress along a spiritual path. Ego is always trying to achieve spirituality. It is rather like wanting to witness your own funeral.

Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquility, nor is it attempting to be a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes.

There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing compared to self-swindlers.

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did

persuading himself that he was a most conscientious and glorious martyr, [he] nobly resolved to do what, if he had examined his own heart a little more carefully, he would have found he could not resist. Such is the sleight of hand by which we juggle with ourselves, and change our very weaknesses into stanch and most magnanimous virtues!

Men who are thoroughly false and hollow, seldom try to hide those vices from themselves; and yet in very act of avowing them, they lay claim to the virtues they feign most to despise