Top 100 Quotes About Deception
#1. Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.
Ben Macintyre
#2. Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.
Soren Kierkegaard
#3. They who learn the lesson of self-deception too well shall perish by that deception.
Frank Herbert
#4. When we consider reality itself we quickly become aware of its infinite complexity, and we realize that our habitual perception of it is often inadequate. If this were not so, the concept of deception would be meaningless.
Dalai Lama
#5. A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.
Henrik Ibsen
#6. The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.
Baruch Spinoza
#7. Unfortunately, most Christians do not understand the battle they are fighting, the enemy that they face, or the means God has provided to overcome the temptations and deception of this present world system.
Chip Ingram
#8. The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.
Frank Herbert
#9. The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.
Lord Acton
#10. Many people criticize those who long to experience more in God, but I don't trust the ones who don't. We are not going to be kept free from deception by abandoning experience. In fact, the ones who do not hunger more for God are already deceived.
Bill Johnson
#11. I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.
Errol Morris
#12. I pray to God that I shall not live one hour after I have thought of using deception.
Elizabeth I
#13. All confrontation is based on deception.
Paul Watson
#14. To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized. While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.
Carson McCullers
#15. People's feelings are easily swayed. The things reflected in people's eyes are full of deception. Nothing is as it appears.
Ai Yazawa
#17. The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.
Annie Jacobsen
#18. Beauty is only skin deep but deception goes right to the core.
Jayce O'Neal
#19. We are bastards of the gods, Sorvus, you and I. I once shared the dream you seem to think you are now living. The dream of living here, in Northbrook, the birthplace of our mothers." Thais turned his head to the trees. He heard something. "Such deception.
Madison Thorne Grey
#20. She would have said that love was hocus-pocus, a deception, and she believed that. But at the prospect she still felt a hush, a flutter along the nerves, a bowing down of sense, a flagrant postration
Alice Munro
#21. Life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#22. Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.
Elias Canetti
#23. Deception is one of the quickest ways to gain little things and lose big things.
Thomas Sowell
#24. Authenticity was the key to any deception.
Sometimes authenticity was disgusting.
Jodi Meadows
#25. Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.
Carl Sagan
#26. She'd never tolerated deception regarding her strong opinions--that much was true. But wasn't it also true that when it came to trying to please in matters that weren't crucial to her, that didn't compromise her sense of things, she had been dishonest?
Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera
#27. Perhaps the most tragic way that self-deception harms us is that we start believing our lies and we teach them to others.
Cortney S. Warren
#28. They have lived life. They have experienced joy. They met comfort and they saw deception. Their lives have something for us! Young ones, go to the aged and ask them why their age?
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#29. Lord, show me how to gird up the core of my being with Your truth so that I don't fall into deception of any kind. Teach me to not only know Your truth, but to live in
Stormie O'martian
#30. Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments.
Jack London
#31. I wrote these words for everyone who struggles in their youth.
Who won't accept deception instead of what is truth.
It seems we lose the game, before we even start to play.
Who made these rules? We're so confused. Easily led astray.
Lauryn Hill
#32. Proselytizing is only wrong if coercive or deceptive. Coercion, whether violent or not, is immoral, just as deception is immoral.
David Novak
#33. The Good News means we can stop lying to ourselves. The sweet sound of amazing grace saves us from the necessity of self-deception. It keeps us from denying that though Christ was victorious, the battle with lust, greed, and pride still rages within us.
Brennan Manning
#34. The habit of employing self-deception to maintain one's self esteem has often become so ingrained that the first step to developing accurate self-awareness is honest acknowledgment of the existence of hidden emotions, motives and tendencies in the mind without immediately suppressing them.
Bhikkhu Analayo
#35. This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.
Holly Black
#38. Deception is a temporary medicine that gives relax for short time, but when the truth gets at even the actual medicine breaks down.
Ahsan
#39. Our minds have a great capacity for deception. This does not mean we are necessarily dishonest but if we are not careful, when our brains do not have answers, our minds will create them.
David W. Earle
#40. People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
Claude Debussy
#41. I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are IMPOSSIBLE.
William James
#42. Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#43. We are partners in our own deception. The lies we tell ourselves. The life we have settled for, when we yearn for the life we wish for. We become our own worst enemy as we yearn for the things we don't have and discredit the gifts we have.
Tony Curl
#44. The worst lies are almost always silence - or else truth, tainted with just enough deception to rot it to the core.
Jim Butcher
#45. The theory of dependence will take the wrong path and lead to deception if the analysis is not put within the framework of the worldwide class struggle.
Gustavo Gutierrez
#46. There is as much deception in noise as there is in silence
Jacqueline Carey
#47. Some people have abusive, negative, controlling tendencies in their blood; they are wired for havoc, bickering and deception.
Bryant McGill
#48. The fundamental deception of Satan is the lie that obedience can never bring happiness.
R.C. Sproul
#49. Life is deceitful because all warfare is based on deception.
William C. Brown
#50. He wasn't yours to get hurt by. He was someone else's and you knew that, so why are you offended? What right do you have to be hurt when you were a part of the deception (lying by omission)?
Donna Lynn Hope
#51. Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
Ian McEwan
#52. My head said one thing, while my heart said another. Angel vs. Devil time! Yes, that's right. Grace's angel says to laugh back and continue. Grace's devil says to throw caution to the wind and be bold. Bold never comes!-Grace from Deception (Fey Court Trilogy) Book 1
Cyndi Goodgame
#53. We are all deceivers to some degree. The difference between safe and unsafe "liars" is that safe people own their lies and see them as a problem to change as they become aware of their deception.
Henry Cloud
#54. Deception was an inherent trait of intelligent beings. Even his love, in her ample ardor, would weave him a guilty lie for his own good. And he treasured her just as well for those tales he was sure she'd already spun.
Darrell Drake
#55. Prose pretends to be straightforward in its application to the truth, but truth itself is a dissembler. Poetry, much more honest, knows the deception can't be overcome.
Laurence Overmire
#56. Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it stains the soul, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into greater darkness. As a boy, I could not have put
Dean Koontz
#57. Our covetousness for miracles and wonders leads into self-deception
Sunday Adelaja
#58. I was afraid the staff would laugh at me - and as frightened as I was, the thought of derision frightened me even more. In retrospect, it was a life-threatening deception, somewhat along the lines of hiding recurrent chest pains from one's cardiologist from embarrassment. Nearly
Elyn R. Saks
#59. Deception, I came to realize, was one of the few remaining oral traditions.
Alex Stone
#60. Which would enable him to prolong for the time being, and to renew for one day more the disappointment, the torturing deception that must always come to him with the vain presence of this woman, whom he might approach, yet never dared embrace.
Marcel Proust
#61. The man was no stranger to deception, and yet his heart was pounding wildly now. He took another deep, throbbing breath. You've been deceiving people for years, he reminded himself. It's what you do.
Dan Brown
#62. The underlying principle of all Satan's tactics is deception. He is a crafty and clever camouflager.
Billy Graham
#63. Megan's deception is another hook on which I can hang my conscience.
Jenny Lloyd
#64. It lies in humanity's infinite capacity for self-deception where some perceived (and in this case long-desired) advantage is at stake
Antonia Fraser
#65. The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.
Colin Wilson
#66. From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America.
George McGovern
#68. All aspects of honor derive from honesty. A liar cannot truly be honorable, for where is the honor in deception?
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#69. Self-deception comes from not having enough psychological strength to admit the truth and deal with the consequences that will follow when the truth is acknowledges.
Cortney S. Warren
#70. Coquetry is the art of successful deception.
Louise Colet
#71. Deception may give us what we want for the present, but it will always take it away in the end.
Rachel Hawthorne
#72. Profit is sweet, even if it comes from deception.
Sophocles
#73. Faith has always struck him as either a tremendous gift or an appalling deception, depending on whether there's a God or not.
Nick Harkaway
#74. Cheating in school is a form of self-deception. We go to school to learn. We cheat ourselves when we coast on the efforts and scholarship of someone else.
James E. Faust
#75. The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.
Sam Harris
#76. Pastors uses peoples ignorance to spread their deception.
Sunday Adelaja
#77. This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?
Mary McCarthy
#78. Breakthrough focused gospel leads to lies and deception
Sunday Adelaja
#79. It is interesting to me how technology has in many ways facilitated and refined the practice of deception
Suzanne Rindell
#80. Self-deception can be more comforting than self-knowledge.
We like to fool ourselves.
Russ Roberts
#81. The church today is riddled with fad doctrines and new sounds that distract from the clear message of the Great commission in the New Testament. Any message that attracts you which does not bring glory to Christ is the message of a seducing spirit and the man giving it is in deception.
John Hagee
#82. The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. We cannot be any of these things. We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance - and choose wisely.
Kevin DeYoung
#83. How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#84. I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception ... I have deceived my friends - and I had millions of them.
Charles Van Doren
#85. The bigger the sin, the rarer and more expensive the bird that is needed to erase it. Is that how the bird pardoner conducts his business? A sparrow for a small deception, but a paradise flycatcher and a monal pheasant for allowing a doubt about His existence to enter the mind.
Nadeem Aslam
#86. Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.
Claude Debussy
#87. Love is a deception that gives the illusion that we're not alone in this world. But we are. We are so terribly alone.
S.L. Boo
#88. Love is self deception. I am a living creature. Hate is only self love. I am a double feature.
Henry Rollins
#89. Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.
Honore De Balzac
#90. If the defeated and depressed group of disciples overnight could change into a victorious movement of faith, based only on autosuggestion or self-deception-without a fundamental faith experience-then this would be a much greater miracle than the resurrection itself.
Pinchas Lapide
#91. Mona told herself that even if her recent feelings were a delusion, they were by far preferable to the thirty years of immaculate deception she had suffered in her first marriage. Yet she had to forgive Akbar Ahmad - perhaps because he was already dead.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi
#92. I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn't recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.
Julian Barnes
#93. True believers, comrade Gadin said, make the worst enemies if and when they become disillusioned with communism, or they finally see through the deception.
Tomas Schuman
#94. A truth is what it is. A lie, a thought out deception more brutal than a truth could ever be.
Charlotte Armstrong
#95. It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
Teju Cole
#96. The meaning of Maya is magic, affection, attachment, deception. That meaning, which results from mixing all of these, is called life. In other words, life is maya
Pratibha Ray
#97. If we can but tear the blindfold of self-deception from our eyes and loosen the gag of self-denial from our voices, we can restore our country to greatness.
Theodore C. Sorensen
#98. People wear masks in the light because true happiness are the agents of deception and delusion.
Lionel Suggs
#99. I understand the need for deception. I should; I live a life of it. Distasteful, perhaps. But necessary.
Virginia Boecker
#100. People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they're children.
Dean Koontz
