Self-deception Quotes

I suppose we all lie to ourselves sometimes.

Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pr...

People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and ...

Thus, you see, he arrived at the same end, via supposed duty, that he was previously pledged to via ...

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposi...

How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he ha...

And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by ...

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free...

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I hav...

There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bu...

It was strange to Old Robert that he, who knew so much more than his neighbors, who had pondered so ...

More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, a...

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

Did I know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to the bottom, and to b...

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain tro...

The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of ...

Every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality ...

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfe...

For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any ...

The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their con...

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this w...

Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I m...

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- ...

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convin...