That which man dreams of and to Which he aspires, unless fulfilled in his own lifetime, can produce no actual satisfaction to him. It will be self deceiving and a waste of time to advocate dialogue with those who are not ready to listen, because it is obvious that the freedom of millions is not a commodity subject to bargaining. It is better to die free than to live as slaves.
Reason deceives us; conscience, never.
In fiction the narrator is a performance of voice, and it can be any style of voice, but I'm interested in the ways that a voice that knows it's telling a story is actually telling a different story than it intends to. In the way that I can sit here and tell you what I had for breakfast, but I'm really telling you that I'm having an affair, something like that. And I don't think my writing is plain, but I think a lot of my characters are just talking. There is vulnerability there, in that we can start to see through them, we can start to see where they're deceiving themselves.
When we successfully deceive others, they are not aware of it; the same is true with self-deception.
Funny, now I can see, how looks can be deceiving.
Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.
Therefore do not deceive yourself! Of all deceivers fear most yourself!
Man has the supreme knack of deceiving himself; the Englishman is supremest among men.
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something. . . but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.
Reason deceives us more often than does nature.
Men who can succeed in deceiving no one else, will succeed at last in deceiving themselves.
I detest those who deceive me.
We are never so easily deceived as when we imagine we are deceiving others.
Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.
Nature does not deceive or conceal, but reveals.
And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere 'modernity' cannot kill.
The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.
We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.
Cheats easily believe others as bad as themselves; there is no deceiving them, nor do they long deceive.
If we say that we have no sin, We deceive ourselves, and there's no truth in us. Why then belike we must sin, And so consequently die. Ay, we must die an everlasting death.