Quotes about self-deception

“But, Corbet, there were things—between us—”

“You imagined many of them. You wanted them to be true, and so they were. But only to you.”

Nobody will admit his own mental inferiority, even to himself.

People see what they want to see.

He picked the rock back up. “Do you believe that it floated?”

“No!” I sulked, rubbing my temples.

“Good. It didn’t. Never fool yourself into perceiving things that don’t exist.”

And because she so desperately wanted it to be true, she knew she could not manage an objective judgment.

We’re talking about something we all want very much to find. And that automatically makes Ed’s conclusions suspect.

Would you prefer a reinforcement of what you already want to believe, or do you seek the truth?

Did everyone in jail think they were innocent? All this time Peter had spent lying on the bench, convincing himself that he was nothing like anyone else in the Grafton County Jail—and as it turned out, that was a lie.

Even though he wasn’t entirely convinced of the truth of what he was saying, the fact of saying it was curiously reassuring to his mind.

Are these signs of hope, or do we deceive ourselves by wishing them to be?

My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.