42 Self-Deception Quotes For Reflection

In our journey toward self-awareness, few obstacles are as challenging to confront as self-deception. This subtle yet pervasive force can cloud our judgment, distort reality, and hinder personal growth. To aid in the pursuit of clarity and truth, we've assembled a curated collection of 42 insightful quotes on self-deception. These carefully selected reflections serve as gentle reminders of the importance of honesty with oneself. Whether you are seeking inspiration, introspection, or a bit of both, these quotes offer a thought-provoking lens into understanding the complex dance between truth and illusion. Join us as we delve into the wisdom of thinkers, philosophers, and writers who have grappled with the timeless challenge of self-deception.

1. “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

2. “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

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

4. “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” - Saul Bellow

5. “I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.” - S.E. Hinton

6. “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

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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.” - Charles Dickens

11. “Thus, you see, he arrived at the same end, via supposed duty, that he was previously pledged to via interest. I fancy a good number of us, when any line of action will promote our own interest, can make ourselves believe that reasons exist which compel us to it as a duty.” - Elizabeth Gaskell

12. “If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.” - W. Somerset Maugham

13. “Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good.” - David Salle

14. “Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.” - Rudyard Kipling

15. “What do you mean, Phib?" asked Miss Squeers, looking in her own little glass, where, like most of us, she saw - not herself, but the reflection of some pleasant image in her own brain.” - Charles Dickens

16. “No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.” - Fulke Greville

17. “For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!” - Wilhelm Reich

18. “I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is meI believe in my dance-- And my destiny” - Sam Shepard

19. “The best lies about me are the ones I told.” - Patrick Rothfuss

20. “Reality denied comes back to haunt.” - Philip K. Dick

21. “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

22. “If our subject persuades himself to believe contrary to the evidence in order to evade, somehow, the unpleasant truth to which he has already seen that the evidence points, then and only then is he clearly a self-deceiver.” - Herbert Fingarette

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.” - Derek Landy

28. “Subconsciously he knew why it was happening, but a truth suppressed is a reality ignored.” - Luke Montgomery

29. “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

30. “It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.” - Marcel Proust

31. “We all grasp on to a single idea of ourselves, the way aging people dye their hair. It’s no matter that this dye doesn’t fool you. My lady, you don’t dye your hair to decieve other people, or to fool yourself, but rather to cheat your image in your mirror a little.” - Luigi Pirandello

32. “Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.” - Cees Nooteboom

33. “Stop lying to yourself. When we deny our own truth, we deny our own potential.” - Steve Maraboli

34. “As for self-deceit, most people find it as essential for survival as air. You rarely indulge in it.” - Dean Koontz

35. “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

36. “Avoidance of self deception is a matter of integrity not comfort.” - Orrin Woodward

37. “I suppose we all lie to ourselves sometimes.” - Cassandra Clare

38. “How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.” - George Eliot

39. “To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?” - Pascal Mercier

40. “The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.” - Tim Kreider

41. “Self-deception is a defining part of our human nature. By recognizing its various forms in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able to disarm them and even, in some cases, to employ and enjoy them. This self-knowledge opens up a whole new world before us, rich in beauty and subtlety, and frees us not only to take the best out of it, but also to give it back the best of ourselves, and, in so doing, to fulfil our potential as human beings. I don't really think it's a choice.” - Neel Burton

42. “Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.” - Pascal Mercier