Deceits Quotes & Sayings

To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name. — Marshall McLuhan

I strongly disagree that we should not judge other people. Wisdom means good judgement. Those who fail to judge wisely often fall victim to superficial deceits. However, we should:
Judge ourselves before judging others;
Judge their hearts not their clothes;
Judge their actions not their words;
Judge the present not the past. — Melissa M.L. Wong

See, those things go their way that others may succeed them, and that a whole may exist comprised of all its parts, though a lowly whole indeed. "But I," says the Word of God, "shall I depart to any place?" Fix your dwelling there, my soul, lay up there for safe-keeping whatever you have thence received, if only because you are weary of deceits. — Augustine Of Hippo

Desire gives pain to the heart from which springs both hope and worry.
Out of suspicion I make mistakes that grow into lasting ills. And from my stubborn delusions come a thousand deceits, which later I accept as damage I've done. — Laurel Corona

Remember that life holds out many pleasing deceits to us by the vanity of glory; for that when we are beginning to live, then we are dying. There is, therefore, nothing more profitless than ambition. — Theophrastus

There is no end to the deceits of the past ... — Vernon Lee

Sir, to deal with foreign rulers is to deal with lies and deceits. All the time. A French king, a Spanish emperor - any one of them - will swear he is your friend, while in truth he has his own agenda that he is pursuing mercilessly, behind your back. It is the way the world works. The key is to recognise that, accept it, and keep moving. Keep stepping lightly as the squares on a chequerboard shift beneath your feet — H.M. Castor

I do care a great deal about the environment but my real work and my greatest challenge is trying to overcome deceits that end up jeopardizing public health and safety. — Erin Brockovich

He saw Forest and understood what Seer had meant. It was an illusion. It was a tangled knot of fears and deceits and dark struggles for power that had disguised itself and almost destroyed everything. — Lois Lowry

The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out. — Charlie Pierce

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind. — Brian Eno

Though neither happiness nor respect are worth anything, because unless both are coming from the truest motives, they are simply deceits. A successful man earns the respect of the world never mind what is the state of his mind, or his manner of earning. So what is the good of such respect, and how happy will such a man be in himself? And if he is what passes for happy, such a state is lower than the self-content of the meanest animal. — Richard Llewellyn

It was an illusion. It was a tangled knot of fears and deceits and dark struggles for power that had disguised itself and almost destroyed everything. Now it was unfolding, like a flower coming into bloom, radiant with possibility. — Lois Lowry

Now the Gang of McCrook was a miserable mob,
for whom robbing you blind was an everyday job.

They were known for their violence and criminal feats,
for a seedy selection of sinful deceits
from robbery, arson, and pyramid schemes,
to snatching the mascots from basketball teams.

They had once robbed a pet shop of all of its cash,
and they never - not ever - recycled their trash! — Robert Paul Weston

There are not anywhere else so many ways of trickery, so many false lights, so many veils, so many guises, so many illusive deceits, as are practiced in every man's conscience in respect to his motives, thoughts, feelings, conduct, and character. — Henry Ward Beecher

Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods, appear to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick. — Vladimir Nabokov

I also realized that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them. So I chose another guide and said, Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[A]ll who are smitten with the love of books think cheaply of the world and wealth; as Jerome says to Vigilantius: The same man cannot love both gold and books ... The hideousness of vice is greatly reprobated in books, so that he who loves to commune with books is lead to detest all manner of vice. The demon, who derives his name from knowledge, is most effectually defeated by the knowledge of books, and through books his multitudinous deceits and the endless labyrinths of his guile are laid bare to those who read ... — Richard De Bury

A healthy church is not a church that's perfect and without sin. It has not figured everything out. Rather, it's a church that continually strives to take God's side in the battle against the ungodly desires and deceits of the world, our flesh, and the devil. It's a church that continually seeks to conform itself to God's Word. — Mark Dever

He didn't go down to dinner at all that night, didn't eat, didn't drink, simply thought of his wife, trying to decide what to do with her. He'd wanted her to suffer, and she'd suffered. He'd wanted her to pay for her deceits, and she'd saved his life. He'd wanted to torment her with the knowledge that she would never see him again and had instead created his own private hell. He wanted her to come to him again, giving herself to him as she had that night before her attempted escape, and he wanted to hear words she would never speak. He'd even started lying to himself as he lay sleepless in his bed, reliving each moment of their last night together, telling himself it was real, that she'd meant every word. He was going mad. — Elizabeth Elliott

I have always had a lot more trouble with my truths than with my deceits. — Mercedes McCambridge

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. — Marshall McLuhan

Some disguised deceits counterfeit truth so perfectly that not to be taken in by them would be an error of judgment. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives.
Are self deceivers, but the worst of all
Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy'
And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall. — Louis MacNeice

The deceits which her spinster's sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgment are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children's hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say. — Alice Munro

The only really detestable character in Chaucer's company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch's hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare's, and his brazen acknowledgment of the tricks and deceits of his trade. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Expressed in Latin, it would have read Exi, impie, exi, scelerate, exi cum omnia fallacia tua, which translates into English as "Depart, impious one, depart, accursed one, depart with all your deceits. — Dean Koontz

In endeavor itself there is a certain dynamic entertainment, affording an illusion of useful purpose. With achievement the illusion is dispelled. Man's greatest accomplishment is to produce change. The only good in life is study, because study is an endeavor that never reaches fulfillment. It busies a man to the end of his days, and it aims at the only true reality in all this world of shams and deceits. — Rafael Sabatini

He'll take from your mind the answer best suited to lead you on, to enthrall you. He'll weave a web of deceits so thick you won't see the world through it. He wants your strength and he'll say what he must say to get it. Break the chain, child! You're the strongest of them all! Break the chain and he'll go back
to hell for he has no other place to go in all the wide world to find strength like yours. Don't you see?
He's created it. Bred sister to brother, and uncle to niece, and son to mother, yes, that too, when he had
to do it, to make an ever more powerful witch, only faltering now and then, and gaining what he lost in one generation by even greater strength in the next. What was the cost of Antha and Deirdre if he could have a Rowan! — Anne Rice

All Pretences of foretelling by Astrology, are Deceits; for this manifest Reason, because the Wise and Learned, who can only judge whether there be any Truth in this Science, do all unanimously agree to laugh at and despise it; and none but the poor ignorant Vulgar give it any Credit. — Jonathan Swift