Harlan Coben Quotes

Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

A form of self-delusion.

It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

when we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it; we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.

The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.

To seek a justification for a decision already made.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

We are all very ready to believe what we like.

In intelligence you can justify almost anything you want to if you go about it with enough zeal and effort which is what happened.

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view.

Human beings will justify anything.

One theme we look at is what psychologists call motivated reasoning; lay people refer to it as self-deception, wishful thinking or rationalization. The list of creative ways people have for reaching conclusions they wish to reach and dismissing conclusions they find threatening is amazing. We've shown that it goes down even to the level of visual perception: You literally see what you want to see.

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

Man has an infinite capacity to rationalize - especially when it comes to what he wants to eat.

One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.

The things that we want we willingly believe, and the things that we think we expect everyone else to think.

I do think that sometimes you can invent more palatable or digestible reasons versions or reasons, when perhaps you don't want to admit the truth to yourself, and sometimes we deceive ourselves - along with others - about our reasons and motives.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.