Top 100 Quotes About Self Deception
#1. Lean into the sharp points and fully experience them. The essence of bravery is being without self-deception. Wisdom is inherent in (understanding) emotions.
Pema Chodron
#2. The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?
Umberto Eco
#3. If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time.
Steven Pinker
#5. Quite possibly the only infinite power in the universe may be the human capacity for self-deception.
Michel Templet
#6. Therefore, Christ crucified is the foundation of all honest and everlast- ing joy. No self-deception is necessary to enjoy it. Indeed all deception must cease in order to enjoy it to the full.
John Piper
#7. Self-deception fools all of the people all of the time.
Marty Rubin
#8. I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.
S.E. Hinton
#9. Defeat is real. It is also temporary. We have to understand both. Faced for what it is, absorbed and met without self-deception, defeat can offer wisdom and motivation. Begin even though you know that you will suffer failure and defeat along the way.
Eric Greitens
#10. The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it's translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#11. The farther away you are from the truth, the more the hateful and pleasurable states will arise. There is also self - deception.
Bodhidharma
#12. and there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception
Arthur Koestler
#13. Love of another is merely empty flattery and self-deception for one who cannot accept himself without pretense.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#14. Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded.
Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#15. Walking away from bad situations and negative people sets a healthier tone for the rest of your life. It also gives those who do not know any better the opportunity to self-correct.
Gary Hopkins
#16. The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency
the belief that the here and now is all there is.
Allan Bloom
#17. To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?
Pascal Mercier
#18. Marcie: I know you're still wounded. Danny, you have to let it go. That is what this mind game is all about, discovering who we are.
Humans lie to themselves all the time. There should be no disgrace in being human, that is what I believe.
Andrew Neff
#19. Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.
Pascal Mercier
#20. Self-sacrifice is one of a woman's seven deadly sins (along with self-abuse, self-loathing, self-deception, self-pity, self-serving, and self-immolation).
Sarah Ban Breathnach
#21. People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.
Vladimir Lenin
#22. Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating disease of intellect: self-deception. The best of all possible worlds and the worst get their dramatic coloration from it. As nearly as we can determine, there is no natural immunity. Constant alertness is required.
Frank Herbert
#23. You are believing not in your god but in yourself if your god knows no better than you do ... and yet, in this alone, I am afraid, you have already been fooling yourself.
Criss Jami
#24. Stop lying to yourself. When we deny our own truth, we deny our own potential.
Steve Maraboli
#25. People love answers, but only as long as they are the ones who came up with them.
Criss Jami
#26. The human heart is so steeped in self-deception that it can easily outrun its own lies. It can use even meticulous honesty as a form of dishonesty, a way of saying to God, "Look how honest I am.
Andrew Klavan
#27. Deception and self-deception are intimately intertwined. We fool ourselves in order to fool others, and we fool others in order to fool ourselves.
Clancy Martin
#28. Sometimes her capacity for self-deception disturbed her.
Mary Balogh
#29. Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.
James Richardson
#30. Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.
Jonathan Franzen
#31. Prayer, true prayer, does not allow us to deceive ourselves. It relaxes the tension of our self-inflation. It produces a clearness of spiritual vision. . . . It saps our self-deception and its Pharisaism. . . . So by prayer we acquire our true selves."242
Timothy J. Keller
#32. Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits
Michael Novak
#33. Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#34. In a competition for mates a well developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage. The same is true in politics and and other contexts
John Gray
#35. When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire.
Darin Strauss
#36. A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.
Alexander Cockburn
#37. The denial of truth does not harm the Truth; it only harms that which denies the Truth.
Criss Jami
#38. Lord, free us from our self-deception and attune our hearts to your Spirit, that we might remember how you humbled yourself, and learn to serve one another, whatever our disagreements. Amen.
Shane Claiborne
#39. Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception - a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to ... inevitabilities.
Brian Friel
#40. A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
#41. From beginning to end, all this phony relationship can offer you is a toxic combination of fake love and real abuse. He constructs the psychopathic bond through deception and manipulation. You maintain it through self-sacrifice and denial.
Claudia Moscovici
#43. We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I'm well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.
Mark Lawrence
#44. Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.
Cees Nooteboom
#46. She wanted to have him hold her and tell her all the demons were pretend, that there was no monster in her closet, that everything would be okay. But that was a lie. The demon was in her head, telling her she was too fat. She had to get the demon out. But she couldn't do it by herself.
Jackie Morse Kessler
#47. It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.
Chris Hedges
#48. Reality blithely ignores the lies we tell ourselves about it.
Chris Cogan
#49. At the most basic level, self-deception is fooling ourselves into believing something that is false -- or -- not believing something that is true.
Cortney S. Warren
#50. There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction ... no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.
Irvine Welsh
#51. The key method of self-deception about your salvation is to avoid self-examination about the state of your life. The
Gregory Forster
#52. If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
William Maxwell
#53. I believe in my mask
The man I made up is me
I believe in my dance
And my destiny
Sam Shepard
#54. We are inconsolable at being deceived by our enemies and being betrayed by our friends, yet we are often content in be being treated like that by our own selves.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#55. As in everything else, I must start with myself. That is: in all circumstances try to be decent, just, tolerant, and understanding, and at the same time try to resist corruption and deception. In other words, I must do my utmost to act in harmony with my conscience and my better self.
Vaclav Havel
#56.
Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture?
David Bohm
#57. Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.
Karen Horney
#58. I'm a bartender. I like recipes. They're concretes. Was the drink recipe for seduction one shot charm and two shots self-deception, shaken, not stirred?
Karen Marie Moning
#59. I'm not the person I used to be. I never was.
Marty Rubin
#60. No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.
Fulke Greville
#61. It is better to admit your failure than to live in self deception
Sunday Adelaja
#62. A mask can hide you from others, but not from yourself.
Marty Rubin
#63. I just can't believe that there won't come a day when people won't be fed-up with being overfed. That they won't get fed-up with the self-deception that all this fantastic food is the whole point of life.
Gudrun Ensslin
#64. It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy
#65. The path of truth is profound - and so are the obstacles and possibilities for self-deception.
Chogyam Trungpa
#66. Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.
Moss Hart
#67. Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one's most reassuring self-deceptions!
Ashim Shanker
#68. The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial.
Robin Marantz Henig
#69. She liked to 'leave dishes to soak', an act of self-deception that I've always abhorred.
David Nicholls
#70. In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.
Carol Tavris
#72. Allow me now to return to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half painful self-deceit, to call them).
Mary Shelley
#73. It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.
Robert Motherwell
#74. I am without illusions; what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for wanting to guide others?
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#75. Time and time over it is the ones who try a little too hard to be innovative rebels - and for the sheer glory of being considered innovative rebels - who then turn out not quite as innovative or as rebellious as they would like to think they are.
Criss Jami
#76. It was strange to Old Robert that he, who knew so much more than his neighbors, who had pondered so endlessly, should be not even a good farmer. Sometimes he imagined he understood too many things ever to do anything well.
John Steinbeck
#77. The fallow soil of loneliness is fertile ground for self-deception.
Dean Koontz
#79. Subconsciously he knew why it was happening, but a truth suppressed is a reality ignored.
Luke Montgomery
#80. No prize , however great can justify an ounce of self deception or a small departure of the ugly facts. ( Notes from Underground)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#81. The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.
Plato
#82. The road to self-deception is narrow to begin with, but there's always someone ready to broaden it out, for as the proverb says, self-deception is like eating or scratching, it's all a matter of beginning.
Jose Saramago
#83. It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized.
Debbie Ford
#84. I love you as the mother of my child: the kiss of death.
Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a piece of self.
Suzanne Finnamore
#86. If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance.
Marcus Aurelius
#87. I would desire every divine to beware that he tell not the unsanctified, that whoever hath the least degree of love to God for himself, and not as a means to carnal ends, shall certainly be saved ; for he would certainly deceive many thousand miserable souls that should persuade them of this (670).
Richard Baxter
#88. You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.
Jodi Picoult
#89. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.
Charles Dickens
#90. Odd how people interested in religion spend so much time trying to convert the obvious meaning of their texts that are their authority.
Nanamoli Thera
#91. If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth.
Neel Burton
#92. If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.
Errol Morris
#93. Questions are only offensive to those who have something to hide
Gary Hopkins
#94. 'fundamentalism' and 'liberalism' and terrorism.' These labels only tell us partial truths. We must use them humbly, guardedly, Niebuhr would say, aware of the limitations of our own vision and of our own capacity for misunderstanding and self-deception.
Krista Tippett
#95. Self-deception ultimately explains Japan's plight. The Japanese have never accepted that change is in their interest - and not merely a response to U.S. criticism.
Paul Samuelson
#96. Being deeply knowledgeable on one subject narrows one's focus and increases confidence, but it also blurs dissenting views until they are no longer visible, thereby transforming data collection into bias confirmation and morphing self-deception into self-assurance.
Michael Shermer
#97. Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again - words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!
Erich Maria Remarque
#98. Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#100. When we successfully deceive others, they are not aware of it; the same is true with self-deception.
Mardy Grothe
