611 Quotes About Denial

Ignorance is avoiding that which stands in front of me out of the misplaced hope that it will put what I’m ignoring behind me. Instead, it’s most certain to drop it on top of me.

The worst denial of all is being in denial that we’re in denial in the first place. And I would wonder if that’s not exactly where most of us live out most of our lives.

I’ve suppressed my aspirations to forget all rationality and let the moment explain everything, for nothing to be said and everything understood. If only I knew how to let these feelings out.

Denial of one's need for others is the most common type of defense against bonding. If people come from a situation, whether growing up or later in life, where good, safe relationships were not available to them, they learn to deny that they even want them. Why want what you can't have? They slowly get rid of their awareness of the need.

Most people, including Ma, preferred to brush unpleasantness away, as if, by sweeping it outside with the dust, it could be forgotten. As if, by acknowledging the existence of something unsavory in their community, they might be tainted by it themselves.

This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.

I see how you look at me,” spits the hateful man. He thinks we look upon him with the evil eye when we are not looking at him that way at all. We are just looking at him. It’s because he can’t accept the hate inside of himself that he projects it onto us.

While the differences between love and hate can be blurred and difficult to decipher at times, the dichotomy of denial and acceptance are much more distinct. One is halting and aggressively rejects all truth, while the other is more passive and at peace – welcoming whatever truth is in waiting, whether fortunate or tragic.

Knowledge is responsibility, which is why people resist knowledge.