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. 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
#4. Quite possibly the only infinite power in the universe may be the human capacity for self-deception.
Michel Templet
#5. 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
#6. Self-deception fools all of the people all of the time.
Marty Rubin
#7. 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
#8. The farther away you are from the truth, the more the hateful and pleasurable states will arise. There is also self - deception.
Bodhidharma
#9. and there was only one revolutionary virtue which he had not learned, the virtue of self-deception
Arthur Koestler
#10. Love of another is merely empty flattery and self-deception for one who cannot accept himself without pretense.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#11. 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
#12. People always have been and they always will be stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics.
Vladimir Lenin
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Sometimes her capacity for self-deception disturbed her.
Mary Balogh
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits
Michael Novak
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. The key method of self-deception about your salvation is to avoid self-examination about the state of your life. The
Gregory Forster
#29. 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
#30.
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
#31. Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.
Karen Horney
#32. 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
#33. It is better to admit your failure than to live in self deception
Sunday Adelaja
#34. 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
#35. The path of truth is profound - and so are the obstacles and possibilities for self-deception.
Chogyam Trungpa
#36. Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.
Moss Hart
#37. 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
#38. She liked to 'leave dishes to soak', an act of self-deception that I've always abhorred.
David Nicholls
#39. 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
#40. It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.
Robert Motherwell
#41. 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
#42. The fallow soil of loneliness is fertile ground for self-deception.
Dean Koontz
#44. No prize , however great can justify an ounce of self deception or a small departure of the ugly facts. ( Notes from Underground)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#45. The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.
Plato
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. '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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. When we successfully deceive others, they are not aware of it; the same is true with self-deception.
Mardy Grothe
#55. Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.
Todd Solondz
#56. Humans have an evolved capacity to engage in self-deception in order to navigate through life in a delusional state of blissful ignorance.
Gad Saad
#57. The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.
Stefan Zweig
#58. The essence of bravery is being without self-deception.
Pema Chodron
#59. The fundamental factor of self-deception is this constant desire to be something in this world and in the world hereafter.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#60. Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.
Stephen King
#61. One major cost of self-deception is that we use painful life experiences to justify being non-ideal versions of ourselves.
Cortney S. Warren
#62. [Optimism] is not about providing a recipe for self-deception. The world can be a horrible, cruel place, and at the same time it can be wonderful and abundant. These are both truths. There is not a halfway point; there is only choosing which truth to put in your personal foreground.
Sonja Lyubomirsky
#63. Of all forms of deception self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#64. The mask of self-deception was not longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord.
Robert W. Chambers
#65. The areas in which we felt most insecure, unsafe, unloved, uncomfortable, embarrassed, angry, and generally unresolved as a child are the areas that we will be most prone to self-deception as an adult.
Cortney S. Warren
#66. Self-deception is nature; hypocrisy is art.
Mason Cooley
#67. There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
Walter Lippmann
#68. This is the real tragedy of mankind, that until now the spirit of man has not been able to free itself, even along the path of its own development, from the tentacles of self-deception.
Phyllis Bottome
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. But it also demonstrates how difficult it is to correct a false belief after people have made an emotional investment in that belief being true. When our heroes turn out to be sleazebags, self-deception is easier than facing the facts.
Jon Krakauer
#73. 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
#74. Love is self deception. I am a living creature. Hate is only self love. I am a double feature.
Henry Rollins
#75. 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
#76. Self-deception can be more comforting than self-knowledge.
We like to fool ourselves.
Russ Roberts
#77. 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
#78. He who knows himself, knows his Lord' means, among other things, that self-deception prevents knowledge.
Idries Shah
#79. It is self-love and its offspring self-deception, which shut the gates of heaven, and lead men, as if in a delicious dream, to hell.
Christian Scriver
#80. Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards ...
Nelson Algren
#81. Food, clothing and shelter - these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception.
U.G. Krishnamurti
#83. If tempted by something that feels "altruistic," examine your motives and root out that self-deception. Then, if you still want to do it, wallow in it!
Robert A. Heinlein
#84. If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography.
Germaine Greer
#85. Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called "the self" can be both deceiver and deceived.
Steven Pinker
#87. People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.
Vladimir Lenin
#88. Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self-deception we call mythology.
Rene Girard
#90. One of the greatest obstacles I see to our fashioning a rational approach to spirituality is to have religious superstition and self-deception masquerade as science.
Sam Harris
#91. 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
#92. The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.
Colin Wilson
#93. 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
#94. Our covetousness for miracles and wonders leads into self-deception
Sunday Adelaja
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.
Carl Sagan
#100. 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
