Tom Wolfe Quotes

For when I fool the people I fear, I fool myself as well.

I'm not in a position to tell anyone anything about how to live his or her life, but I think it's worth noting that no one can lie to us as effectively as we can lie to ourselves. We know exactly what to say! And I do think that women, even extremely smart women, can be very, very vulnerable to men.

A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.

It is the human wish to be told lies that keep us as primitive morally and socially as we are. I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for mere reason to kill.

All men lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so often that they almost come to believe it... though some small part of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show upon their faces. (a servant in the House of Black and White)

Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.

Depression, pain, and fear are gifts that say, "Sweetheart, take a look at your thinking in this moment. You're living in a story that isn't true for you." Living a lie is always stressful. And investigating a lie through The Work always leads you back to who you are. Who you are is not an option. You are love. It hurts to believe you're other than who you are, to live any story less than love.

If you are often deceived by those around you, you may be sure that you deserve to be deceived; and that instead of railing at the general falseness of mankind, you have first to pronounce judgment on your own jealous tyranny, or on your own weak credulity.

Weaklings must lie.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

The truth is, I've never fooled anyone. I've let men sometimes fool themselves.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

I am such a bad liar. I would like to lie, though.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

Anybody can make something up and have it sound believable. The hard part is remembering all the lies you've told, and all the people you've told them to, and then living the lies that have become your life.

I am excited to show people how, when you get older, you get deeper, you get more raw, you get more honest, and you stop pretending to be the person you think people want you to be. I stopped worrying about what people wanted me to say and just sort of dug deep into my personal arsenal of my mistakes and shameful thoughts.

I'm the worst liar - I can't lie for my life. And I don't lie at all, because I'm the worst liar - but as a kid, I thought I was a great liar, so I would lie all the time, but everybody knew I was lying.

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

A lover's a liar, To himself he lies, The truthful are loveless, Like oysters their eyes!

The most offensive is not their lying - one can always forgive lying - lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth - what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying.

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.

Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.

The mirror can lie. It doesn’t show you what’s inside.

I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

You can fool people some of the time, but you can't fool them all of the time.