Self Deception Quotes

“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 Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“The best lies about me are the ones I told.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“The fact is that we have no way of knowing if the person who we think we are is at the core of our being. Are you a decent girl with the potential to someday become an evil monster, or are you an evil monster that thinks it's a decent girl?"

"Wouldn't I know which one I was?"

"Good God, no. The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Works

“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, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

“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, The Closing of the American Mind

“Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“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, Vanishing Acts

“My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”
― Ted Chiang, Exhalation

“If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“I often find that people confuse inner peace with some sense of insensibility whenever something goes wrong. In such cases inner peace is a permit for destruction: The unyielding optimist will pretend that the forest is not burning either because he is too lazy or too afraid to go and put the fire out.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“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, Porno

“It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me
I believe in my dance-- And my destiny”
― Sam Shepard

“I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.”
― Nicole Lyons, Hush

“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, Prince of Fools

“There is no deception on the part of the woman, where a man bewilders himself: if he deludes his own wits, I can certainly acquit the women. Whatever man allows his mind to dwell upon the imprint his imagination has foolishly taken of women, is fanning the flames within himself -- and, since the woman knows nothing about it, she is not to blame. For if a man incites himself to drown, and will not restrain himself, it is not the water's fault.”
― John Gower, Confessio Amantis, Volume 1

“For some, life may be a playground to undermine the brainwaves of others or simply a vainglorious game with an armory of theatrics, illustrating only bleak self-deception, haughty narcissism and dim deficiency in empathy. ("Another empty room")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“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, Killosophy