Quotes About Self-deception

It costs an unreasonable woman no more to pass over one reason than another; they cherish themselves most where they are most wrong.

How do you circumvent a mind bent upon lying to get away from the truth?

She keeps telling herself and others that she doesn't want a relationship to silence the longing in her soul. That alternative fact feeds her insecurities and starves her soul.

I think the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It's actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what's killing us.

In plain language, we cannot live except as self-deceivers who must lie to ourselves about ourselves, as well as about our unwinnable situation in this world.

Question: How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things truly are in this world at its deepest level? Answer: Because we have done it before.

The clarifying principle made clear the impermanence of things. It was an illusion, all of it—this life that they clung to, this earth that they battled over—a collective exercise in self-deception. The world was perishable.

You can look in the mirror and try to hide it and cover it up, and it may work here or there, but there ain't no shirt or hat you can put on or haircut you can get to hide the fact that you're morbidly obese.

I don't think any responsible performer would go on stage high. If he convinced himself he is better that way, he is deluding himself.

And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

Humans make a machine, and then fool themselves into believing that their own brains are no better than the machines. This allows them to believe that their creation, the computer, is as brilliant as their own minds. But it's a ridiculous self-deception. Computers aren't even in the same league.

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is.

But you're too ready to believe what you want to believe, that's your trouble.

think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he's rich and powerful because he's the cream and has risen to the top. But he's not stupid. He knows he's kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance.

I don't think that the average person is sixty percent good and forty percent prick. I think that the average person sometimes kids himself that he's the center of the universe, and it's okay if he does something that he'd be pissed about if someone else did it to him, and tries not to think about it too hard.

We are all worth something, she said. Zottas are not worth more than the rest of us. Self-Deception makes us into monsters. Selfishness is an excuse to busy your empathy. People are basically good. Live as though it was the first days of a better [nation].

it never comes down to a single thing you did or didn't do or say. You might convince yourself it did, but it didn't.

She thought she loved, she thought she was full of love.

He had not the faintest knowledge what it really was, but he would never have sunk so low as to confess that to his womenfolk. They listened and believed him. He believed himself.

drinking, being. The practical problem in this way of thinking is that all too often people simply wind up doing less and less zazen, deluding themselves into believing that since all their activities are zazen there is no need to sit and face the wall and do zazen.

he believed that there is no end to the mischief and hatred which men harbor deep in themselves and unknown to themselves and no end to their capacity to deceive themselves and that though they loved life, they probably loved death more and in the end thanatos would likely win over eros .

Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.

Sometimes we want something to be true so badly that we convince ourselves that it is true.