Lying Quotes

The truly scary thing about undiscovered lies is that they have a greater capacity to diminish us than exposed ones.

~ Cheryl Hughes

The opportunity to deceive others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross. Few of us are murderers or thieves, but we have all been liars. And many of us will be unable to get safely into our beds tonight without having told several lies over the course of the day.What does this say about us and about the life we are making with one another?

~ Sam Harris

Take back your power! I wish you the wisdom to realize that the problem isn't that they keep lying to you, it's that you keep believing them.

~ Steve Maraboli

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

~ Frank Herbert

Well the other thing about lying is that the liar is banking on two things when telling the lie. They are hoping that the person being lied to is gullible enough to believe, and it’s also not even that they think they are gullible, it’s that they know the person they are lying to well enough that they know the person won’t push it any further because they know the person they are lying to wants to believe the lie.

~ Garry Crystal

...the truth was more powerful than a lie could ever be (Eric)

~ Shannon A. Thompson

Interesting, but she could see that the boy didn't have a single lie in him. A very rare condition, especially for the male of the species.

~ Alice Hoffman

We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.

~ Frans Kellendonk

More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

You can't lie in a magical forest! It will ruin all the magic!

~ Michael Delaware

You may have noticed that people in bus stations, if they know you also are alone, will glance at you sidelong, with a look that is both piercing and intimate, and if you let them sit beside you, they will tell you long lies about numerous children who are all gone now, and mothers who were beautiful and cruel, and in every case they will tell you that they were abandoned, disappointed, or betrayed--that they should not be alone, that only remarkable events, of the kind one reads in a book, could have made their condition so extreme. And that is why, even if the things they say are true, they have the quick eyes and active hands and the passion for meticulous elaboration of people who know they are lying. Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever been otherwise. Loneliness is absolute discovery.

~ Marilynne Robinson

Honesty can force any dysfunction in your life to the surface. Are you in an abusive relationship? A refusal to lie to others – How did you get that bruise? – would oblige you to come to grips with this situation very quickly. Do you have a problem with drugs or alcohol? Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others noticing.Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow but haven’t.

~ Sam Harris

The code of the con is to know just enough about everything so you can lie about anything.(attrib: E. Tancarville)

~ Dan Garfat-Pratt

The real promise in too many promises is a promise that I’m going to be disappointed.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I was recently living more comfortably surrounded by secrets... Like dozens of luxurious satiny pillows, they were embracing me from all directions into safe lulling warmth, thus isolating me from the sharp dead-cold edges of the truth hiding behind their endearingly smooth textures and tender soothing colours.Secrets could be so irresistibly beautiful...

~ Simona Panova

I was beginning to agree with the thesis that some truths were better off dead.And buried.

~ Simona Panova

I lie more convincingly than I tell the truth.

~ Simona Panova

Lying in small doses makes a good storyteller great.

~ Bryan Way

Their fate rested entirely on me. I could save them by telling the truth. I could destroy them by lying. No one should have that much power.

~ Neal Shusterman

In thy foul throat thou liest.

~ William Shakespeare

True evil is unlikely to receive an invitation from us, so it clothes itself in just enough truth to make itself look appealing and then it looks to unpeel us.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.

~ Joseph Brodsky

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

~ Jacques Derrida

and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing, a very serious thing indeed.

~ C.s. Lewis

You can lie in any language on earth, and body language is no exception.

~ Nenia Campbell

Lie until even you believe it - that's the real secret of lying

~ Holly Black

If you’re lying to everyone you know, including yourself, at every possible turn, is a little upheaval really the worst that could happen to your life right now?

~ Agnostic Zetetic

Brastias. My friend.” Uh-oh, this couldn’t be good. “Do you lie to me?”“Uh . . . no.”“See? That’s a lie!

~ G.a. Aiken

I don't sleep. I just let my body lie itself into numbness and lie to myself that I can't hear, see, or feel anything.

~ Will Advise

You think it’s because they’re lying? Nonsense! I like it when people lie! Lying is man’s only privilege over all other organisms. If you lie--you get to the truth! Lying is what makes me a man. Not one truth has ever been reached without first lying fourteen times or so, maybe a hundred and fourteen, and that’s honorable in its way; well, but we can’t even lie with our own minds! Lie to me, but in your own way, and I’ll kiss you for it. Lying in one’s own way is almost better than telling the truth in someone else’s way; in the first case you’re a man, and in the second—no better than a bird! The truth won’t go away, but life can be nailed shut; there are examples. Well, so where are we all now? With regard to science, development, thought, invention, ideals, aspirations, liberalism, reason, experience, and everything, everything, everything, we’re all, without exception, still sitting in the first grade! We like getting by on other people’s reason--we’ve acquired a taste for it! Right? Am I right?

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

No one answer is ever the answer.

~ Ahmed Mostafa

Sometimes, lies were the same things as wishes. Sometimes, wishes were things to hate.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

The foundation of morality to have done, once and for all, with lying.

~ Thomas H. Huxley

But I knew what it said. That I could be imperfect, but only so much. Human, but only within limits. And honest, to her or to myself, never.

~ Sarah Dessen

Anything is better than lies and deceit!

~ Leo Tolstoy

Yeah, it never fails to amaze me how a single lie can undo an entire lifetime of good. (Aiden)

~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

[If a man] postpone[s] any open acknowledgement... that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends [are] based... he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all sorts of cynical and sceptical attitudes which are not really his. But... they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.

~ C.s. Lewis

Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to almost never shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the point of view of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.

~ Sam Harris

Truth speaks for itself if we’d just let it speak.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Such is the power of truth that even the slightest whisper of it can handily drown out the most boisterous of lies, which may explain why in many instances God only needs to whisper.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough