Quotes & Sayings About Comforting Lies

Comforting lies are better than a hurting truth, is my policy, but it's impossible to lie in front of you — D. Aswini

It is better to choose to know the painful truth rather than settle on a comforting lie. Resolve to look for and to accept the truth, no matter how much it hurts. Nothing built on lies lasts. — Rod Dreher

Kids delight in 'magical thinking', whether in the form of the Tooth Fairy or the saints: whether you see these as comforting lies or eternal verities, they are part of how we help kids make sense of the world. — Emma Donoghue

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding - a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.
There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths. — Peter Watts

Every artist was haunted by lies. Every artist fought to find truths. Every artist failed. Some turned back, embracing those comforting lies. Others took their own lives in despair. Still others drank themselves into the barrow, or poisoned everyone who drew near enough to touch, to wound. Some simply gave up, and wasted away in obscurity. A few discovered their own mediocrity, and this was the cruellest discovery of all. None found their way to the truths. — Steven Erikson

Comforting lies get far too easy with practice. — Peter Watts

In a series of three studies, the offenders who claimed they were abused as a child were 67 percent, 65 percent, and 61 percent without the threat of a polygraph. With polygraph (and conditional immunity), the offenders who claimed they were abused as children were 29 percent, 32 percent, and 30 percent, respectively. The polygraph groups reported approximately half the amount of victimization as children as the nonpolygraph groups did.
Nonetheless, the notion that most offenders were victims has spread throughout the field of sexual abuse and is strangely comforting for most professionals. — Anna C. Salter

I want nothing more than to climb between the silk sheets and wrap our nude bodies around one another. I want to hold and be held. Sex is a wondrous thing, but tonight I wish to be comforted more than pleasured. I feel like a child in the dark who knows the monsters are under the bed. I want to be told it will be alright, but I am far too old to believe such comforting lies.
- Jean-Claude — Laurell K. Hamilton

Do not be deceived by the outside appearance of order in our plutocratic society. It fares with it as it does with the older norms of war, that there is an outside look of quite wonderful order about it; how neat and comforting the steady march of the regiment; how quiet and respectable the sergeants look; how clean the polished cannon ... the looks of adjutant and sergeant as innocent-looking as may be, nay, the very orders for destruction and plunder are given with a quiet precision which seems the very token of a good conscience; this is the mask that lies before the ruined cornfield and the burning cottage, and mangled bodies, the untimely death of worthy men, the desolated home. — William Morris

Shadow wondered whether the path of comforting lies would have been a better one to walk. — Anonymous

Today, when death and old age are increasingly concealed behind euphemisms and comforting baby talk, and life is threatened with being smothered in the mass consumption of hypnotic mechanized vulgarity, the need to confront man with the reality of his situation is greater than ever. For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness; to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions - and to laugh at it. — Martin Esslin

But what Liberty would remember best was the feel of his own small hand gathered in the warm, comforting grip of the man, those times alone when all of Thatcher's potent attention was concentrated on his son, as something inside Liberty always insisted, occasionally to contrary evidence that it should be, their trips together, their talks, the information about the sorry state of the world Thatcher shared reluctantly, almost sadly, with his son and heir out of a conviction that I do not enjoy having to tell you these things, but it is important you hear this news, no matter how distasteful, because, unfortunately, it is the truth, whereas it is lies and the promulgation of lies that will make you and the people in your life sick. — Stephen Wright

Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both. — Patrick Ness