Self - Delusion Quotes

 

"Above all, do not lie to yourself." 

― Dostoevsky

“If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.” ~ Ronald Reagan

“The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.” ~ Voltaire

“The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.” ~ Michael Shermer

“Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.” ~ Irving Layton

“I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.” ~ John Steinbeck

“An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.” ~ Adrienne Rich

“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.” ~ George Orwell

“Celebrity gives us delusion of self importance.” ~ Al Goldstein

“I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests’ lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I’m interviewing somebody, I’m getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.” ~ Terry Gross

“Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex.” ~ Daniel S. Greenberg

“Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion.” ~ Jim Rohn

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” ~ Leo Tolstoy

“I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it’s no problem for me to believe that I’m somebody else.” ~ Daniel Day-Lewis

“I seek the truth…it is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance that does harm.” ~ Marcus Aurelius

“Worship means reverence and humility it means revering your real self and humbling delusions.” ~ Bodhidharma

“History is the lies of the victors.” ~ Julian Barnes

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” ~ Julian Barnes

“There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual” ~ James Russell Lowell , Self delusion quotes in life

“No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals.” ~ Dean Koontz

“We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.” ~ Michael Crichton

 

“The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion.” ~ E. O. Wilson

“Vanity, wounded pride, rejection, self-delusion. I could recite a litany of little pinpricks that finally produce a gaping wound. That’s how marriages and friendships come apart.” ~ Helen Van Slyke

“There’s always an element of self delusion among people who believe they ought to be President. There’s an underestimation of your opponent and an overestimation of your own abilities. This is compatible with being rich and powerful, the idea that we were blessed by God because we deserve to be blessed.” ~ Jimmy Carter

“The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion – in the long run, these are the only people who count.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein

“Optimism is a tonic. Pessimism is poison. Admittedly, every businessman must be realistic. He must gather facts, analyze them candidly and strive to draw logical conclusions, whether favorable or unfavorable. He must not engage in self-delusion. He must not view everything through rose-colored glasses. Granting this, the incontestable truth is that America has been built up by optimists, not by pessimists, but by men possessing courage, confidence in the nation’s destiny, by men willing to adventure to shoulder risks terrifying to the timid.” ~ B. C. Forbes

“Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.” ~ John Twelve Hawks

“You don’t have to be Dave Halberstam to see that the American role in both conflicts [the Iraq war and the Vietnam conflict] is characterized by arrogance, ignorance and self-delusion at the highest levels of government.” ~ Jonathan Yardley

“Men, unlike mockingbirds, have the capacity for systematic self-delusion. We echo each other with equal precision, equal eloquence, equal assurance.” ~ Robert Ardrey

“There are certain ways you have to delude yourself. Self-delusion is important, for instance in family life. You know what I mean? If you’re in love with your wife you have to go in there with blind faith. You have to support everything. And with your kids, you have to believe that you’re doing something that has higher purpose; even though you don’t have any evidence that that’s the way it’s going to turn out.” ~ Greg Graffin

“I’d actually love to think that I could trust Kerry on national security. But the only way I could do that, at this point, would be via self-delusion.” ~ Glenn Reynolds

“It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness.” ~ Calvin Coolidge

“That’s kind of what trust is, isn’t it? A willful self-delusion.” ~ Brandon Sanderson

“I flattered myself that I was rather empathetic, that I had rather good imaginative empathy. I’ve realized now that that was a complete self-delusion and that I didn’t really have any comprehension of what it was like to see your entire life go catastrophically wrong in a matter of moments.” ~ Decca Aitkenhead

“Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.” ~ Richard Matheson

“Ruthven surmised that he had hit upon some of the central deceptions which had wrecked him and reduced him and so many of his colleagues to this condition. To surmise was not to conquer, of course; he was as helpless as ever but there was a dim liberation in seeing how he had been lied to, and he felt that at least he could take one thing from the terrible years through which he had come: he was free of self-delusion.” ~ Barry N. Malzberg

“A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.” ~ H. L. Mencken

 

“Men educate each other in reason by contact or collision, and keep each other sane by the very conflict of their separate hobbies. Society as a whole is the deadly enemy of the particular crotchet of each, and solitude is almost the only condition in which the acorn of conceit can grow to the oak of perfect self-delusion.” ~ Edwin Percy Whipple

“A direct statement about yourself is considered objective only if it is negative. If it’s positive, it is considered subjective. And ‘objective’ means it is accurate, and ‘subjective’ means it is conceited self-delusion.” ~ Barbara Sher

“Fox News seems much more conservative than it is because no other television network over the past half-century has been anything but decidedly liberal. When the media norm is liberal, liberals equate liberalism with objectivity and deviations from it as bias, just as liberals preach tolerance toward all ideas – except conservative ones. Their self-delusion is surreal.” ~ David Limbaugh

“The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character’s self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I’m sorry I don’t get to pick and choose.” ~ Anne Tyler

“Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.” ~ Scott Adams

“Writing is the perfect balance between self-confidence and self-doubt, with a bit of self-delusion thrown in.” ~ Judith Kelman

 

“To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth, or heal our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.” ~ Lynn Margulis

“The most foreign fighters in Iraq are wearing British and American uniforms. The level of self-delusion is bordering frankly on the racist. The vast majority of the people of Iraq are against the occupation of Iraq by the American and British forces.” ~ George Galloway

“What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?’ ‘History is the lies of the victors,’ I replied, a little too quickly. ‘Yes, I was rather afraid you’d say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. … ‘Finn?’ ‘”History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” (quoting Patrick Lagrange)” ~ Julian Barnes

“If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion.” ~ Max Scheler

“It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion” ~ Calvin Coolidge

“A form of self-delusion.” ~ Elbert Hubbard

“Not complete inaction, which is an error, a confusion, a self-delusion, an impossibility, but action full and

free done without subjection to sense and passion, desireless and unattached works, are the first secret of perfection.” ~ Sri Aurobindo

“When you are filled with soul energy you become magnetic.” 11 Teachings to help on the journey to Soul Realization: (1) Practive humility; (2) Give up pride and self-delusion; (3) Practice loving kindness; (4) Give up anger, hatred and vindictiveness; (5) Practice generosity; (6) Avoid greed and stealing in its different aspects; (7) Practice honesty; (8) Avoid maliciousness and exploiting lies; (9)Practice moderation; (10) Avoid excessiveness; (11) Do not allow yourself to be enslaved by your lower nature” ~ Choa Kok Sui

“Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) – neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.” ~ William Hazlitt

“We all need a bit of self-delusion. It gets us over the difficult spots.” ~ John Ralston Saul

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.” ~ Dan Simmons

“People compose the schedules they do out of the priorities they have; and someone who says otherwise is deceiving himself about what he really values. The same thing applies to money that applies to time. I make a practice of watching what people do, never what they say. Whatever is important, to anyone sane, he will make a place for it; people live out their values. Values are different in this respect from “ideals,” which are typically vain and effete and thus exist mostly for the sake of promoting self-delusions.” ~ Kenny Smith

“The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.” ~ Richard Dawkins

“Your cowardly self-delusions about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness- that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone anything you say” ~ Richard Yates

“We cannot move casually into a better future. We cannot casually pursue the goal we have set for ourselves. A goal that is casually pursued is not a goal; at best it is a wish, and wishes are little more than self-delusion.” ~ Jim Rohn

“I have a theory about marriage, Monsieur Boustouler. And it’s that nearly always you will know within two weeks if it’s going to work. It’s astonishing how many people remain shackled for years, decades even, in a protracted and mutual state of self-delusion and false hope when in fact they had their answer in those first two weeks.” ~ Khaled Hosseini