Self Deception Psychology Quotes & Sayings

I am convinced that UFOs exist because I've seen one ... — Jimmy Carter

Confirmation bias is the most effective way to go on living a lie. — Criss Jami

Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situation. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories. — Rabih Alameddine

We live in a world where terrorism has a more familiar meaning than peace. — Keely Barton

Deception and self-deception are intimately intertwined. We fool ourselves in order to fool others, and we fool others in order to fool ourselves. — Clancy Martin

You must never be afraid in New York City, because then you will call bad stuff to you and you will not like it there. — Roseanne Barr

The beauty of the world is the tender smile of Christ to us through matter. He is really present in universal beauty. Love of this beauty proceeds from God and descends into our souls and goes out to God present in the universe. It too is something like a sacrament. — Simone Weil

Charlie Chaplin's genius was in comedy. He has no sense of humor, particularly about himself. — Lita Grey

If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth. — Neel Burton

A short death is the sovereign good hap of human life. — Pliny The Elder

Humans have an evolved capacity to engage in self-deception in order to navigate through life in a delusional state of blissful ignorance. — Gad Saad

This idea comes to me that we're all grass blades on the same lawn. We've grown up together, shoulder to shoulder, under the same sun, drinking the same rain. But you know what happens to grass blades-somebody cuts them down just when they reach their prime. — Tim Tharp

Reality denied comes back to haunt. — Philip K. Dick

Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain
from cosmology to psychology to economics
has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music. — Sam Harris

hypocrisy; rejecting what you firmly have in your fist — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what's happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self. — Sharon Salzberg

Beast had once informed me that humans were hunters only by luck and because they had opposable thumbs. — Faith Hunter

Clever deceivers rarely tell outright falsehoods. It's too risky. The art of deception is closely related to the magician's craft: it involves knowing how to draw attention to a harmless place, to deflect it away from the action. Deeply entrenched patterns of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive dispositions serve as instruments of deception. A skilled deceiver is an illusionist who knows how to manipulate the normal patterns of what is salient to their audience. He places salient markers - something red, something anomalous, something desirable - in the visual field, to draw attention just where he wants it. — Clancy Martin

It's just a storm in a tea cup,' someone says
The cup of suffering is not the same size for everyone. — Paulo Coelho

Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty - could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was made the principle of psychology itself). — Friedrich Nietzsche

Sexual fulfillment goals, to make them happen, you have to work on them as a project. I don't think it's a bad thing. — Margaret Cho