Quotes About Self-deception

Illusion I will be, for I've never been a sinner.

Facts are irrefutable. Truths coming from those facts can be difficult to accept, particularly when they are of a personal nature. But truths, Agent Puller, cannot be ignored. Any more than lies can. And people do lie to themselves. All the time. We

That's not how human psychology works. No, we tend to do lots of things without knowing why. We need excuses, though, so we rationalize! If an obvious reason for our behavior isn't readily available, we invent one, preferably one that helps us think better of ourselves.

How strange. Humans always seem so much in control. Is it just a grand act, to fool both others and themselves?

Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliché. So yet another layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself that my loneliness was special, that is was uniquely my fault because I was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow.

college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they're exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else.

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliché. So yet another layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself that my loneliness was special, that it was uniquely my fault because I was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow.

Few love to hear the sins they love to act.

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.

Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.

It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you.... you've got to find an answer to the question: Why go on?

Those who do not know themselves and are totally deceived about their own abilities are in the same position whether they are dealing with other people or any other aspect of human affairs.

It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous.

From C. R. Rogers's (1961) perspective, the problems of inauthenticity arise not because a person hides his real emotional reactions from others (as may sometimes be appropriate) but because he hides them from himself.

Emma hung up and hugged her pillow tight to her chest. He shouldn't be making her feel this special and desired. He was just a friend. Right, just a friend. She wasn't even fooling herself anymore.

Y yo le dije que sí, porque hay momentos en que aunque uno no crea ni en el cielo ni en la vida después de la muerte, es mejor mentir. Le mentí a él y me mentí a mí.

That's the trick about denial, isn't it? Once you start lying to yourself, there's no one else to stop you from believing your own bullshit.

Most men are a confusion of half-truths and vanity, of something lost and never completed.

If our subject persuades himself to believe contrary to the evidence in order to evade , somehow, the unpleasant truth to which he has already seen that the evidence points, then and only then is he clearly a self-deceiver.

Some people are stupid but they know it and can deal with it. They are the smart stupid people. The stupid stupid people are those who are so stupid that they think they're smart. Holdoffer not only fell into that category, he owned it.

As long as he deceived himself about the truth, he could blame fortune and have confidence in the future. Now the clouds of madness were closing round his mind.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself lying to others is relatively an exception.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people, some of the time, but you can fool yourself anytime you need to badly enough.