Quotes About Self-delusion

My life is devoted to self-delusion - and I have a great capacity for that - but it's the thing that gives me the most pleasure, so I can't complain about it.

Motel Hell is a black comedy about hypocrisy, about the way in which every person, even serial killers like Farmer Vincent, tell themselves little lies to get through the day. It's easier to do terrible things, one concludes, when you believe you're doing good.

The best fiction is the fiction of self-delusion. It contrasts the banality of our self-made fictions against the hopelessness of the world as it really is. The worst thing that we can tell you at a place like Princeton is that you can have it all." He scanned the small group around him and brushed the leathery buttons holding his vest tightly over his large body. "Well," he said. "You can't.

I keep life filled and speeded up so that I can cheat myself into believing that I am happy and contented, but oh! When night comes and I go to bed and turn out the lights, I lie there in the dark, I realize the absolute futility of trying to kid myself.

We all need a bit of self-delusion. It gets us over the difficult spots." - John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium

Self-delusion is one's failure to recognize a reality. Now, permit me to tell you this. Anyone who thinks or says that true Love does not exist is just delusive. Yes! because, true Love exists and it will ever exist. Note: A Cheat always thinks and says that everyone cheats and a Liar often thinks and says that everyone lies (mark you). -Emeasoba George

he never allowed himself to think about unpleasant things, which answered very well, and could be supported in times of really inescapable stress by his genius for persuading himself that any disagreeable necessity forced upon him by his own folly, or his son's overriding will, was the outcome of his own choice and wise decision.

Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.

I am quite prepared to admit that being habitual liars and self-deluders, we have good cause to fear the truth, but I'm not at all ready to stop hoping. There may be some truths that are, after all, our friends in the universe.

She was one of those middle-aged women who thought they were fooling people.

The worst thing that can happen for a writer is for a writer to start believing their own press. I think the industry, and the comics industry in particular, is littered with the bodies of writers who believed their own press. And you can see the moment they did, and then the work nosedives.

We all have a central fiction about ourselves, a favored delusion about talent or untapped potential. Most of us hang on to it as if it were a lifesaver, even though the obsession with it is often the very thing that drags us down and prevents us from fulfilling some lesser but more obtainable goal.

I talk to people of different ages, and a guy who's 38 who says, 'I could've played Major League Baseball, but I had this knee injury...' Yeah, probably not. It's a big thing with men and sports, where they think they could have touched that thing.

Once you begin to fall off the track and believe you breathe different air to everyone else, you're doomed; you're finished.

I'd actually love to think that I could trust Kerry on national security. But the only way I could do that, at this point, would be via self-delusion.

She had grown so accustomed to this exterior that she didn't always remember what truly lay underneath. Nor did she particularly want to. Why fester in disillusion, bewilderment, and anger when she could float above and pretend to be this sunny, charming girl instead?

Like most of his countrymen, he was carried away by the sound of fine words, especially if uttered by himself.

Many a man has gotten himself killed by believing his own press

That's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion.

but…well, that's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion? You have to shut out that voice that whispers about betrayal, and just hope that your friends aren't going to hurt you.

But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?

Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?

But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? His unconscious was so cowardly that the best partner it could choose for its little comedy was this miserable provincial waitress with practically no chance at all to enter his life!

What identity is more fraught with self-delusion and unacknowledged wrongdoing than American citizenship?