Self Deception Quotes

The truth is that our self-deceptive lies range from seemingly tiny untruths to massive life-altering falsehoods about reality.

~ Cortney S. Warren

Reality blithely ignores the lies we tell ourselves about it.

~ Chris Cogan

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase the good old days has passed from cliché to self-parody.

~ Anna Quindlen

Confirmation bias is the most effective way to go on living a lie.

~ Criss Jami

If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth.

~ Neel Burton

Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situation.

~ Daniel M. Gilbert

To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

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

In these circumstances they did what most of us do, and, being ignorant of the truth, persuaded themselves into believing what they wished to believe.

~ Arrian

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

Of what use was memory anyway than as a template for one's most reassuring self-deceptions!

~ Ashim Shanker

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

Self-deception and vanity are grievous sin. The ego is the cause of all human suffering. We suffer from life only when we fail to examine the cause of our sorrow. Letting go of destructive illusions and freeing oneself from egotism of self-pity enables a person to sense the rich intertexture of their inner world, which is the only facet of reality that we exercise exclusive dominion and control.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Every person is driven to self-deceive, simply to get out of the discomfort of the truth. The best relationships are with people who will not let you be blind. They reveal your hidden strengths and your concealed wounds.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Thank you for undusting my true colors; or color: black... Oh, how I missed the darkness!

~ Ahmed Mostafa

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.

~ Iris Murdoch

As time moves on the line will blur. It will no longer seem to be the simplicity of good versus evil, but good versus fools who think they are good.

~ Criss Jami

For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

~ Thomas Ligotti

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?

~ Pascal Mercier

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

Persecution complexes are reaffirming to those who benefit from unearned privileges.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Be careful not to think that just because you know what a person is going to say, you know what that person is going to do.Be careful not to think that just because you know what a person is going to do to others, you know what that person is going to do (or not do) to you.

~ Clifford Cohen

Every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they’ve been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we’re whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you’re not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that’s been developed…

~ Terence Mckenna

Even if there are instances in which it can be mistook by onlookers, never fool yourself into using misunderstood genius as an excuse to be a fool.

~ Criss Jami

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.

~ Derek Landy

And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character.

~ Hannah Arendt

Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ 

~ Tony Schwartz

With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one's confirmation bias.

~ Criss Jami

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

A mask can hide you from others, but not from yourself.

~ Marty Rubin

Any casual observer can tell at a glance I'm not the person I think I am.

~ Marty Rubin

Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.

~ Neel Burton

When you are the problem, it's hard to see it.

~ Marty Rubin

Find out what faith is and how you can put it into practice.Learn how to pray, and do it.Discover what pride is, and get rid of it.Develop a self-concept that is adequate and accurate.Clarify your values.Identify your talents.Probe the fact, meaning, and use of your sexuality. Face the fact that you engage in self-deception. Reflect on truth that you are made in the image of God. Use your spiritual gift. Clear your conscience. Feel deeply.Enjoy life. Face death.Treat your body right.Conquer the flesh. Depend on the Holy Spirit. Be humble.

~ J. Grant Howard

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state....The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.

~ Henry David Thoreau

There are a great number of ego defenses, and the combinations and circumstances in which we use them reflect on our personality. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum of its ego defenses, which are constantly shaping, upholding, protecting, and repairing it.The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home.

~ Neel Burton

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.

~ Simone De Beauvoir