Quotes About Deception

Later in the journey, Olek turned his head in against Henry's arm and began to weep. He would not at first tell Rosner what was wrong. When he did speak at last, it was to say that he was sorry to drag Henry off to Auschwitz. "To die just because of me," he said. Henry could have tried to soothe him by telling lies, but it wouldn't have worked. All the children knew about the gas. They grew petulant when you tried to deceive them.

The Institute of Confound and Demoralize is something that Mimi has made up to deal with the contradictions that seem to arise with alarming frequency. Coffee is bad for you. Coffee is good for you. Red win helps blood health. Red wine reduces your ability to fight infection. Exercise is essential for general fitness. Exercise contributes to inflammation of the joints. Kale, the silent killer.

Stanley told me that's how everybody does business these days. They make up swell corporations so no one can find them." "It's shell corporations." "That's what we should have done when that Columbus guy showed up.

Under feigned jest Are things conceal'd that else would breed unrest.

Nor dies Revenge although he sleep awhile, For in unquiet, quietness is feigned, and slumbering is a common worldly wile.

No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.

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.

There is no nature to things,' you wrote in the book. 'There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.

If things are not what they seem—and we are forever reminded that this is the case—then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing.

To repeat: we can tolerate existence only if we believe—in accord with a complex of illusions, a legerdemain of impenetrable deception—that we are not what we are. We are creatures with consciousness, but we must suppress that consciousness lest it break us with a sense of being in a universe without direction or foundation. In plain language, we cannot live with ourselves except as impostors.

For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

Devils are not so black as they are painted.

The look of the world's a lie, a face made up O'er graves and fiery depths, and nothing's true But what is horrible. If man could see The perils and diseases that he elbows Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him, Which fall behind and graze him as he passes, Then would he know that life's a single pilgrim Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers

more exasperating is that there is no way to educate or inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

After the long time of going together and the mutual trust that had grown out of that time, Payne had occasion to realize that no mutual trust had grown out of the long time they had gone together.

Ground not upon dreams you know they are ever contrary.

What is got over the Devil's back (that's by knavery), is spent under the belly (that's by lechery).

Never were finer snares for womens' honesties Than are devis'd in these days ; no spider's web's Made of a daintier thread, than are now practis'd To catch love's flesh-fly by the silver wing

Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgements, And should give certain judgement what they see; But they are rash sometimes, and tell us wonders Of common things, which when our judgments find, They can then check the eyes, and call them blind.

Like Dead Sea fruits, that tempt the eye,But turn to ashes on the lips.

My only booksWere woman's looks,And folly's all they've taught me.

She had written Darcy the letter and posted it from her husband's tenth-story office while he was away in some strumpet's bed. And then she'd transformed herself into a bird, and then an anvil, and then a corpse.

Because certainty isn't the same as truth. It just means you're really, really deluded.