Quotes About Self-deception

Denial and affirmation are games which people play. There are people who deny that they are capable of denying, and who would insist that people do not insist.

most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.

Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.

Ni imagines que eres falso, ni te azotes, pues ambas pueden ser formas de autocomplacencia.

Je me suis trompé jusqu'ici; en voilà un qui est plus méchant. »

When all else fails there's always delusion.

But ignorance manufactures denial. So though my eyes were sometimes black or swollen, my lips puffy or busted, though I often intentionally wore clothes that would hide the black and blue bruises scattered all over my body, or grit my teeth through the pain in an effort to walk so I could look as if nothing were wrong—when in fact my entire body was sore—I believed that as long as he didn't break any bones, it wasn't really violence.

You have to fool yourself before you can fool the audience.

Had Beta been French, perhaps he would've been an existentialist, probably though that would not have satisfied him. He smiled contemptuously at mental speculations, for he remembered seeing philosophers fighting over garbage in the concentration camps. Human thought had no significance; subterfuge and self-deception were easy to decipher: all that really counted was the movement of matter.

Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.

Men?s minds are generally ingenious in palliating guilt in themselves.

Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.

There're things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times.

Because 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. And I suspect we are already there.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.

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. And I suspect we are already there.

Perhaps the mirror in Sally's dressing room had waved the wrong way and caused her to look larger than she actually was. And perhaps all that skipping had jumbled her brain and affected her ability to separate reality from wishful thinking.

There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.

Lie to yourself until it's true.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

You'll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you're still the one in control.

Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot.

Love is the most dangerous craving of all, if you ask me. It turns us into people we aren't. It makes us feel like hell, and makes us walk on water. It ruins us for anything else.

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.