75 Quotes About Deceit And Lies

In a world where truth often seems elusive, the power of words has never been more evident. Deceit and lies have woven themselves into the fabric of human interaction, impacting relationships, societies, and even entire nations. Our fascination with this duality of honesty and deception has inspired countless thinkers, writers, and philosophers to ponder over the nature of truth and falsehood. In this carefully curated collection, we delve into the minds of such luminaries, presenting you with 75 insightful quotes that explore the complexities of deceit and lies. These quotes serve as a reminder of the timeless struggle between integrity and deception, offering wisdom, reflection, and perhaps a bit of caution in navigating a world where everything is not always as it seems.

1. “Nothing is easier than self-deceit.For what every man wishes,that he also believes to be true.” - Demosthenes

2. “A lie cannot live.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

3. “To the union of all honest men.” - Aaron Burr

4. “It's easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

5. “To say that the first casualty of war is truth is to miss the rather more important point that a principal weapon of war is lies.” - Harry M. Collins

6. “It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.” - Thomas Paine

7. “There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act.” - Vera Nazarian

8. “If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.” - Marjorie Garber

9. “So let's just forget about the whole thing and agree never to speak of it again. And I promise I'll never lie to you again.Ah, but surely you must be saying, "Hey! Isn't this entire story a work of fiction and therefore one big lie?"Perhaps. But we already agreed never to speak of it again.” - Jason Carter Eaton

10. “I’m going, and don’t you dare try to stop me.”I ran through the door, willing myself to make it downstairs before I started to cry.” - Claudia Gray

11. “Clever as the Devil and twice as pretty.” - Holly Black

12. “Cruel', O'Kelly laughed, 'it's cruel to tell children the truth. If anything convinces me of God's mercy, then it's his gift of making us unable to lie.” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

13. “There is a lie that acts like a virus within the mind of humanity. And that lie is, ‘There’s not enough good to go around. There’s lack and there’s limitation and there’s just not enough.’The truth is that there’s more than enough good to go around. There is more than enough creative ideas. There is more than enough power. There is more than enough love. There’s more than enough joy. All of this begins to come through a mind that is aware of its own infinite nature.There is enough for everyone. If you believe it, if you can see it, if you act from it, it will show up for you. That's the truth.” - Michael Beckwith

14. “Old liarshold lies.” - Toba Beta

15. “I'm telling you a lie in a vicious effort that you will repeat my lie over and over until it becomes true” - Lady Gaga

16. “Bullshit takes no genius,even fool senses its' foul.” - Toba Beta

17. “But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.” - Stephen Fry

18. “If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.” - richard wright

19. “...maybe it's only fitting that relationship that started with a lie would end with one.” - Ally Carter

20. “True love will triumph in the end—which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have.” - John Green

21. “One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it;” - Mark Twain

22. “Reality CheckHis lying is not contigent on who you are or what you do. His lying is not your fault. Lying is his choice and his problem, and if he makes that choice with you, he will make it with any other woman he’s with. That doesn’t mean you’re an angel and he’s the devil. It does mean that if he doesn’t like certain things about you, he has many ways to address them besides lying. If there are sexual problems between you, there are many resources available to help you. Nothing can change until you hold him responsible and accountable for lying and stop blaming yourself. The lies we tell ourselves to keep from seeing the truth about our lovers don’t feel like lies. They feel comfortable, familiar, and true. We repeat them like a mantra and cling to them like security blankets, hoping to calm ourselves and regain our sense that the world works the way we believe it ought to. Self-lies are false friends we look to for comfort and protection—and for a short time they may make us feel better. But we can only keep the truth at bay for so long. Our self-lies can’t erase his lies, and as we’ll see, the longer we try to pretend they can, the more we deepen the hurt.” - Susan Forward

23. “They like to tell us that it is important to speak the truth, but it has been my experience that real happiness lies in having people tell you what you want to believe, usually not the same thing at all, and if you have to stub your toe on the truth later, so be it.” - Jeff Lindsay

24. “I survive at the edge of friends circles.” - Holly Black

25. “I know a lie when I hear one.” - Adrian Mitchel

26. “And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.” - William Faulkner

27. “Perception is the lie that we convince ourselves exists” - Melissa Bradley

28. “Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.” - Criss Jami

29. “Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.” - Philip Pullman

30. “If you've treated your girlfriend without respect, taken advantage of her, or cheated on her, your actions have taught her that she has no value. Needless to say, this is a serious, serious injury. If you don't try to make it right, she might start to believe the lie you've told her and spend the rest of her life thinking she deserves poor treatment.” - Josh Shipp

31. “And remember that within every lie, there is a truth hidden. Know the truth to defeat the lie.” - T. A. Miles

32. “Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.” - David Mitchell

33. “Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.” - Jeanette Winterson

34. “The lie, of course, is more interesting.” - John Irving

35. “Socrates said the perfect society would be based on a great lie. People would be told that lie from the cradle, and they would believe it, because human beings need to make order out of chaos.” - Anne Frasier

36. “When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.” - Haruki Murakami

37. “Whoever tells a lie is not pure of heart, and such a person can not cook a clean soup.” - Ludwig van Beethoven

38. “A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead.” - Jodi Picoult

39. “For people who say they hate being lied to, just start telling them nothing but the pure truth--about everything. That will teach them” - Seth Adam Brown

40. “We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel rage. The feelings must be followed. It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they're your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate the past, each on your brush against, ripping you a little more open and they are always more on the horizon. But you can't face up to the that, so you force yourself to believe the bullshit of those you instinctively know are liars and you repeat those lies to yourself and to others, hoping that by repeating them often and fervently enough you'll attain the godlike status we accord those who tell the lies most frequently and most passionately. But you never do, and even if you could, you wouldn't value it, you'd realise that nobody believes in heroes any more. We know that they only want to sell us something we don't really want and keep from us what we really do need. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we're getting in touch with our condition at last. It's horrible how we always die alone, but no worse than living alone.” - Irvine Welsh

41. “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

42. “Their fate rested entirely on me. I could save them by telling the truth. I could destroy them by lying. No one should have that much power.” - Neal Shusterman

43. “We both knew that what I said was the truth, as well as being a lie. The pure and honest answer was pinging between us, hovering above the weeds.” - Sonya Hartnett

44. “মিথ্যা হলো শয়তানের বিয়ের মন্ত্র। মিথ্যা বললেই শয়তানের বিয়ে হয়। বিয়ে হওয়া মানেই সন্তান-সন্ততি হওয়া। একটা মিথ্যার পর আরো অনেকগুলি মিথ্যা বলতে হয় এই কারণেই।পরের মিথ্যাগুলি শয়তানের সন্তান।” - Humayun Ahmed

45. “The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out that it's not the truth and sometimes I don't know and never know, and sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don't believe he would repeat a lie so often. Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry at me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves her or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling.” - Lydia Davis

46. “They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie.” - Lauren Oliver

47. “Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and all. And once you do, you will feel so much better” - Harvey Milk

48. “The walls were coming down around me, but still, I couldn't imagine telling the truth. Not now. It was too late. How can I tell Mom and Dad what we'd done? It would ruin everything. It would ruin their image of me; it would ruin every thought they'd ever had about who I was. It would be another death.Another loss. Another miscarriage.” - Dana Reinhardt

49. “Men lie the most,women tell the biggest lies.” - Chris Rock

50. “Half-truths are worth more than outright lies.” - George R.R. Martin

51. “My eyes in tearsHeart never sighsMy mind never fearsI conquer the lies” - Munia Khan

52. “She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she'd made her confession, though she didn't regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with her all along. Now that the lie wasn't between them anymore, maybe she could love him again.” - Cheryl Strayed

53. “You lie like butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, Edward."He smiled. "I don't lie to you.""Really," I said.The smile became a grin. "Okay, not most of the time, anymore." His face sobered. "I'm not lying now.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

54. “Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.” - Neil Gaiman

55. “Chi è bravo a mentire tiene la testa alta. Non ha timore. Chi non sa mentire dstoglie gli occhi.” - Guenassia Jean-Michel

56. “Sometimes people don’t want the truth. Sometimes the truth is worse than a lie.” - Chelsea Cameron

57. “they may all be drunk at my place, but they're all honest, and though we do lie-because I lie, too-in the end we'll lie our way to the truth” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

58. “A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.” - Dejan Stojanovic

59. “They lie, you know. It's not easier to ask for forgiveness. Not even a little.” - Michelle Hodkin

60. “From the Absolute to the Relative-from the Infinite to the Finite-from the Undifferentiated to the Differentiated-from the Unconditioned to the Conditioned and again from the Relative to the Absolute. That is the whole truth of the inexistance to the existentialist, formless to the form, Creator to the Creature, one to the every being, absolute to the inabsolute and vis-á-vis, soforth every single thing is temporary, non-existed, so do I, the dream that I dreamed off is simply a 'lie and impermanent too' same as in the mortal world whatever I do experience.” - Upanishad

61. “Of course I do, Jack! You have to beLIEve me!” - Raymond Benson

62. “If I told you, you might be forced to lie about it. Not that you aren't really good at it, but why put an old man in that position?” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

63. “I had fallen in love with a perfect lie.” - R.K. Lilley

64. “Take caution of what lies, in what you may beLIEve.” - Anthony Liccione

65. “The funny thing about a lie is that once it has been said and believed, it lives and becomes. It can't be taken back. It sucks all the air from you until you give up and it takes over and you forget how to breathe on your own. It is like those parasitic relationships, but not like the shark and the little remora that politely cleans the shark's skin and sometimes attaches itself to its underbelly. No, it is more like a tapeworm eating someone from the inside out.” - Carrie Arcos

66. “The truth hurts when you live a life of lies.” - Habeeb Akande

67. “Fill your mind before you empty your mouth.” - Habeeb Akande

68. “People only tell lies when the truth is disagreeable to them, or frightens them, or to cover sin.” - Anne Perry

69. “Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

70. “To find out if she really loved me, I hooked her up to a lie detector. And just as I suspected, my machine was broken.
” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo

71. “the difference between secret andlie is similar to the difference of iceand water.when you heat ice it becomes water.and when you force anyone toreveal there secrets it comes in aform of lie.” - munendra dwivedi

72. “Lying is an art, if you can convince yourself with lie, then you are a master.” - nikhil yadav

73. “I cried for a while, taking solace in the comforting lie of his embrace. The illusion, the fantasy, it helped. I never wanted to leave. I wanted to stay here forever, held tight to his chest, his fingers stroking my hair, his heart beating against my ear: you’re-safe, trust-me, love-you. Love. Did I want him to love me? Yes. I wanted someone to love me. And what was love if not someone risking their lives to save you? Caleb had saved me. Did it mean he loved me? A part of me wanted to think so. To believe in a romantic ideal that didn’t exist. I wanted to believe the lie. But more than that – I wanted it not to be a lie” - CJ Roberts

74. “It was just a lie that seemed real.It was a promise that was never meant to be true.The forever that had a deadline.It felt like falling in love, but it was falling in aheartbreak café!” - Moffat Machingura

75. “Some promises are lies we never meant to tell.” - Robin Maxwell