Quotes About Self-delusion

Faith is a device of self-delusion, a sleight of hand done with words and emotions founded on any irrational notion that can be dreamed up. Faith is the attempt to coerce truth to surrender to whim. In simple terms, it is trying to breath life into a lie by trying to outshine reality with the beauty of wishes. Faith is the refuge of fools, the ignorant, and the deluded,not of thinking rational people.

Faith is a device of self-delusion, a sleight of hand done with words and emotions founded on any irrational notion that can be dreamed up. Faith is the attempt to coerce truth to surrender to whim. In simple terms, it is trying to breathe life into a lie by trying to outshine reality with the beauty of wishes. Faith is the refuge of fools, the ignorant, and the deluded, not of thinking, rational men.

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more.

I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

Release gets addictive, you see. It becomes a fixed behaviour, as destructive as any other. Keep repeating the exercise of grief and it loses meaning, it becomes rote, false, a game of self-delusion, self-indulgence. A way of never getting over anything, ever.

Keep repeating the exercise of grief and it loses meaning, it becomes rote, false, a game of self-delusion, self-indulgence. A way of never getting over anything, ever.

She wanted to blame him, to blame her whole rotton existence. But seeing Ethan, seeing her mother, seeing the world after the world she had known, somehow took her to the very bottom, the end of self-delusion, and the truth enveloped her like a cocoon, and all she said was I was so lonely . And Father Time said, You were never alone.

But America, like every nation, has its ages of psychosis. It has fits of indecision and periods of self-delusion. Consider how presidents spoke movingly of freedom from tyranny while personally holding hundreds of men, women, and children in slavery.

A madman is one who considers himself sane and thinks that fools don't belong in his rank.

When it comes to lying, what one must consider is not the plausibility of the fib but the greed, fear, and stupidity of the receiver. One never lies to people; they lie to themselves. A good liar gives fools what they want to hear and allows them to free themselves from the facts at hand and choose the level of self-delusion that fits their foolishness and moral turpitude. That's the secret. Oldest trick in the world.

When it comes to lying, what one must consider is not the plausibility of the fib but the greed, fear, and stupidity of the receiver. One never lies to people; they lie to themselves. A good liar gives fools what they want to hear and allows them to free themselves from the facts at hand and choose the level of self-delusion that fits their foolishness and moral turpitude.

Loco es el que se tiene por cuerdo y cree que los necios no son de su condición.

It is true, the Zen-man's contempt for conventional and formalistic social custom is a healthy phenomenon, but it is healthy only because it presupposes a spiritual liberty based on freedom from passion, egotism and self-delusion. A pseudo-Zen attitude which seeks to justify a complete moral collapse with a few rationalizations based on the Zen Masters is only another form of bourgeois self-deception.

It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant.

Life is too short to have anything but delusional notions about yourself.

The high is what you crave, what you would kill for... and believe me, you will lie to yourself until it's to late to stop.

I drank in my words like a thirsty man. I even began to believe them.

Miller captures in the play the darkest pathology of white America—the inability to accept who we are, where we came from, acknowledge and take responsibility for the crimes we committed and with that understanding access where we are going and who we want to become. The danger of self-delusion is the central point of Miller's play.

People make the mistake of drinking the Kool-Aid, believing your own hype, letting people tell you you're this or you're that or you're too this.

A un sapo le salen alas y ya cree que es un dragón.

What was said about him, what the females needed to believe about him, was just oral masturbation for mouths that needed to be otherwise occupied.

I seek the truth...it is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance that does harm.

Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger.