Top 100 Quotes About Self Delusion
#2. Once, maybe I would have thought you a fool, but ... well, that's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion? You have to shut out that voice that whispers about betrayal, and just hope that your friends aren't going to hurt you.
Brandon Sanderson
#3. The most foreign fighters in Iraq are wearing British and American uniforms. The level of self-delusion is bordering frankly on the racist. The vast majority of the people of Iraq are against the occupation of Iraq by the American and British forces.
George Galloway
#4. Oh, wait a minute, I was supposed to be cutting back on the self-delusion, wasn't I? Whoops.
Jason Krumbine
#5. If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.
Ronald Reagan
#6. Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.
Irving Layton
#7. Politicians or pundits can distort or cherry-pick climate science any way they want to try and gain temporary influence with the public. But any serious industrialist who's facing 'climate exposure' - as it's now called by money managers - cannot afford to engage in that sort of self-delusion.
Clive Thompson
#8. To reduce the demands of God's law is to do violence to the holiness of God. To inflate one's own self-assessment to the point of self-delusion is an extreme form of pride.
R.C. Sproul
#9. A direct statement about yourself is considered objective only if it is negative. If it's positive, it is considered subjective. And 'objective' means it is accurate, and 'subjective' means it is conceited self-delusion.
Barbara Sher
#10. As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this it is pathetic self-delusion.
Neal Stephenson
#11. Writing is the perfect balance between self-confidence and self-doubt, with a bit of self-delusion thrown in.
Judith Kelman
#12. Religious fundamentalism, magical thinking and self-delusion, have been justifications for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history.
Bryant McGill
#13. Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'
Stephen Sondheim
#14. Human history is one prolonged and painful limping. We invariably step with one foot on the rock of justice, and with the other, we sink into the mire of deceit and self-delusion.
Danail Hristov
#15. Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.
Mark Vonnegut
#16. That's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion.
Brandon Sanderson
#17. There are so many paths to contentment if you're open to self-delusion.
Anthony Marra
#18. Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.
Scott Adams
#19. The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.
Richard Dawkins
#20. Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.
Nick Harkaway
#21. Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.
John Twelve Hawks
#22. Necessity is the mother of self-delusion.
Hugh Laurie
#23. Men, unlike mockingbirds, have the capacity for systematic self-delusion. We echo each other with equal precision, equal eloquence, equal assurance.
Robert Ardrey
#25. I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else!
Daniel Day-Lewis
#26. I seek the truth ... it is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance that does harm.
Marcus Aurelius
#27. 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.
Calvin Coolidge
#28. Of course, that rationalization didn't work at all. It would have helped if I'd had some Oreo cookie ice cream to eat that the same time. I've learned that self-delusion is much easier when there's something sweet in your mouth.
Lee Goldberg
#29. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.
H.L. Mencken
#30. Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex.
Daniel S. Greenberg
#31. We all need a bit of self-delusion. It gets us over the difficult spots. - John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium
John Ralston Saul
#32. If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I think the truth , which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence and self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.
Marcus Aurelius
#33. It was as if his apostasy from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#34. You cannot stare evil in the face; it has no face. It has no body, no bones, no blood. Any attempt to describe it ends in glibness and self-delusion.
Douglas Preston
#35. I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; "faith" a state of willed self-delusion.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#36. 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.
Terry Gross
#37. ... depressive realism. Depression is not the near death experience described by so many, [Kayla Dunn] suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more realistic in their worldview.
Jan Wong
#38. Self-Evaluation is healthy and constructive. Denial and self-delusion is DESTRUCTIVE.
Michelle Cook-Hall
#39. Vanity, wounded pride, rejection, self-delusion. I could recite a litany of little pinpricks that finally produce a gaping wound. That's how marriages and friendships come apart.
Helen Van Slyke
#40. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run, these are the only people who count.
Robert A. Heinlein
#41. I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.
John Steinbeck
#42. He wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion ...
John Le Carre
#43. For the optimal realization of our possibilities, we need to trust ourselves and we need to admire ourselves, and the trust and admiration need to be grounded in reality, not generated out of fantasy and self-delusion.
Nathaniel Branden
#44. Self-esteem is mostly self-delusion, but it serves a purpose. You are biologically driven to think highly of yourself in order to avoid stagnation. If you were to stop and truly examine your faults and failures, you would become paralyzed by fear and doubt.
David McRaney
#45. Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
Dan Simmons
#46. You don't have to be Dave Halberstam to see that the American role in both conflicts [the Iraq war and the Vietnam conflict] is characterized by arrogance, ignorance and self-delusion at the highest levels of government.
Jonathan Yardley
#47. We cannot move casually into a better future. We cannot casually pursue the goal we have set for ourselves. A goal that is casually pursued is not a goal; at best it is a wish, and wishes are little more than self-delusion.
Jim Rohn
#48. Self editing is the path to the dark side. Self editing leads to self delusion, self delusion leads to missed mistakes, missed mistakes lead to bad reviews. Bad reviews are the tools of the dark side.
Eric T. Benoit
#49. Self-delusion is pulling in your stomach when you step on the scales.
Paul Sweeney
#50. The notion of the perfect time is more than myth. It's the ultimate self-delusion.
Gina Greenlee
#51. The human capacity for self-delusion is limitless
Sarah Fine
#52. Not complete inaction, which is an error, a confusion, a self-delusion, an impossibility, but action full and
free done without subjection to sense and passion, desireless and unattached works, are the first secret of perfection.
Sri Aurobindo
#53. I'd actually love to think that I could trust Kerry on national security. But the only way I could do that, at this point, would be via self-delusion.
Glenn Reynolds
#54. There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual
James Russell Lowell
#55. Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.
Paul Hoffman
#57. DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters.
Ambrose Bierce
#59. Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.
Stefan Molyneux
#60. The self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
#61. It is a great delusion in those whose understanding has been darkened by self-love, to think that there is any obedience in the subject who tries to draw the superior to what he wishes.
Saint Ignatius
#62. The most common lie you will ever tell God is your opportunity to do the right thing was taken from you.
Shannon L. Alder
#63. Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
Margaret Atwood
#64. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.
Michael Crichton
#65. It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy
#66. Now there was no sign of any foul weather, but when one wishes to do a thing . . . one finds no lack of reasons for the doing.
Howard Pyle
#67. I live in my mind, such that whatever destroys me shall be a creature of my own invention.
Genevieve Ross
#68. Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
Richard Feynman
#69. If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.
G.K. Chesterton
#70. Celebrity gives us delusion of self importance.
Al Goldstein
#71. That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things is called delusion; that the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self is called enlightenment.
Dogen
#72. Ambitions are like assholes, and they smell like flowers to the owner. I must be delusional. Give it up.
Rafi Zabor
#73. The spiritual path is not a solo endeavor. In fact, the very notion of a self who is trying to free her/ himself is a delusion. We are in it together and the company of spiritual friends helps us realize our interconnectedness.
Tara Brach
#74. We all have a central fiction about ourselves, a favored delusion about talent or untapped potential. Most of us hang on to it as if it were a lifesaver, even though the obsession with it is often the very thing that drags us down and prevents us from fulfilling some lesser but more obtainable goal.
Stephen McCauley
#75. 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
#77. The author concedes that humanity had the fatal tendency to shape truth to our beliefs rather than beliefs to the Truth.
Frank Turek
#78. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt; but in our effort to escape it.
Shannon L. Alder
#79. Johnson was insulated from reality by his hopes and dreams.
Robert A. Caro
#80. To me, God is a name that humans give to all that is. Experientially, it is whatever is left over when the delusion of the self is taken away.
Jay Michaelson
#81. Real Evolution is a state of consciousness. To really and truly evolve, means to align with the truth; to align with something other than the illusion and delusion of the ego mind and lower states of consciousness.
Arielle Hecht
#83. It's funny, in a human kind of way, how we can convince ourselves that we're in control at the very moment we are beginning to lose it.
William Moyers
#84. What freedom is found in recognizing that only God creates! No longer must we labor under the delusion of our own self-importance. We need not find our value in people or possessions - it rests in our origin.
Jen Wilkin
#85. As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion).
Kenny Smith
#86. That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.
Wally Lamb
#87. Every society produces its own cultural conceits, a set of lies and delusions about itself that thrive in the face of all contrary evidence.
Jack Weatherford
#88. To start from the self and try to understand all things is delusion. To let the self be awakened by all things is enlightenment.
Dogen
#89. Gefarhrgeist excelled at convincing themselves. It was their greatest strength and most terrible weakness.
Michael R. Fletcher
#91. I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.
Amy Tan
#92. A person experiences life as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this self-imposed prison, and through compassion, to find the reality of Oneness.
Albert Einstein
#93. The notion of loving oneself has gotten an undeservedly bad rap, which goes something like this: self-love is narcissistic, selfish, self-indulgent, the supreme delusion of a runaway ego looking out for "number one." In fact, just the opposite is true.
Sharon Salzberg
#95. Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain De Botton
#96. The left-hand path adept seeks to liberate him/herself from passive subjection to the illusory nature of Maya, thus freeing the consciousness from the binds of self-created delusion.
Zeena Schreck
#97. To be loved to madness
such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.
Thomas Hardy
#98. I am not holier than you, you are not holier than me. Any one who thinks he is holier than the rest deludes himself.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#99. The trouble with giving yourself a pep talk is, that deep down you know it's all bullshit.
Sophie Kinsella
#100. Exile, like memory, may be a place of hope and delusion. But there are rules of light there and principles of darkness ... The expatriate is in search of a country, the exile in search of a self. - Eavan Boland, OBJECT LESSONS
Kathleen Norris
