Does not people's preoccupation these days with drugs, alcohol, medication and self deception prove that the truth not only hurts, but it is torture to bear?
Fantasy and drama appeal to us. They are socially acceptable and make you feel good about yourself. Moreover, you get rewarded for being cleverly ignorant.
How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonin...
When you are the problem, it's hard to see it.
There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.
The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interpose between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes...
I suppose we all lie to ourselves sometimes.
We are all worth something,' she said. 'Zottas are not worth more than the rest of us. Self-Deception makes us into monsters. Selfishness is an excuse to busy your empathy. People are basically good....
Nothing is so deceiving as knowledge.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?
Reality blithely ignores the lies we tell ourselves about it.
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.
Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for h...
A mask can hide you from others, but not from yourself.
It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.
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