Quotes About Deception

Here is all the invisible world, caught, defined, and calculated. In these books the Devil stands stripped of all his brute disguises. Here are all your familiar spirits-your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. Have no fear now-we shall find him out and I mean to crush him utterly if he has shown his face!

Some dream I had must have mistaken you for God that day.

See, Biff, everybody around me is so false that I'm constantly lowering my ideals . . .

Arthur Miller

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been..

What victory would the Devil have to win a soul already bad? It is the best the Devil wants...

I could tell you things about Louis that wouldn't make you wave at him no more

JIM, gets up: Chris would never know how to live with a thing like that. It takes a certain talent . . . for lying. You have it, and I do. But not him.

Was there any love here? When he needed her, she vomited. And when you needed him, he laughed. What was unbearable is not that it fell apart, it was that there was never anything here.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.

If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

Directly after copulation, the devil's laughter is heard.

Why is it that, in spite of all the mirrors in the world, no one really knows what he looks like?

Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.

No one reveals himself as he is; we all wear a mask and play a role. - On Psychology

In savage countries they eat one another, in civilized they deceive one another; and that is what people call the way of the world!

To free a man from error is not to deprive him of anything but to give him something: for the knowledge that a thing is false is a piece of truth. No error is harmless: sooner or later it will bring misfortune to him who harbours it. Therefore deceive no one, but rather confess ignorance of what you do not know, and leave each man to devise his own articles of faith for himself.

Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf, and that, to conceal their infirmity, they set to work to clap vigorously as soon as ever they saw one or two persons applauding?

The Jews are the scum of the earth, but they are also great masters in lying.

Behind the cross stands the devil.

the ancient wisdom of the Indian philosophers declares, "It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake.

While illusion distorts reality for a moment, error can reign for a millennia in abstractions, throw its iron yoke over whole peoples and stifle the noblest impulses of humanity; those it cannot deceive are left in chains by those it has, by its slaves.

We are all innocent to begin with, and this merely means that neither we nor others know the evil of our own nature.