Quotes About Deception

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.

People are like birds - from a distance, beautiful: from close up, those sharp beaks, those beady little eyes.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Steal the hog, and give the feet for alms.

I gave 'em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I'd have done the same.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

Be advised that all flatterers live at the expense of those who listen to them.

Flattery is all right - if you don't inhale.

Pride is the mask of one's own faults.

He that would pun would pick a pocket.

Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no fibs.

A dimple in the chin; a devil within.

There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying.

We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound Tokens of love and hate, black sorcery stones.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that worked on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn list of good intentions.

We live counterfeit lives in order to resemble the idea we first had of ourselves.

We are betrayed by what is false within.

We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more.

"They say so" is half a lie.

Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion.

Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have ... the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality ... which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.

I know too well the poison and the sting Of things too sweet.

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.

What shadows we are, what shadows we pursue!