169 Quotes About Self-deception

Some people in my position would now have felt rather crestfallen, and would have begun to think that they had made a very foolish mistake. Not the faintest misgiving of any kind troubled me. I did not feel in the slightest degree depreciated in my own estimation. And even now, after a lapse of three hours, my mind remains, I am happy to say, in the same calm and hopeful condition.

Heated argument: when you try to convince someone of what you don't believe yourself.

To a friend, in an unguarded moment, he [Maxim Gorky, 1932] declared his ambition: simply to portray the world and man as they were, without the myth of love, ‘repudiating noting, praising nothing’; repudiation was unjust, while praise was premature—‘for we live in chaos and ourselves are fragments of chaos.’ He compared his desire with Einstein, ‘trying to alter radically our representation of the universe.

To a friend, in an unguarded moment, he [Maxim Gorky, 1932] declared his ambition: simply to portray the world and man as they were, without the myth of love, ‘repudiating nothing, praising nothing’; repudiation was unjust, while praise was premature—‘for we live in chaos and ourselves are fragments of chaos.’ He compared his desire with Einstein, ‘trying to alter radically our representation of the universe.

One might call it the 'mighty surrender': it's sometimes necessary in order to appreciate true greatness in another - this is because there might be a clash of egos, or envy even, or jealousy - and it is through a similar struggle that men and women deceive themselves into rejecting God Almighty.

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.

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.

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

[A]n old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination. We all reinvent our pasts, I said, but writers are in a class of their own.