Robert Frost Quotes

False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

Our capacity for belief is so plastic, we can convince ourselves of anything. Believing is seeing.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

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.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

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

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

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

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

Sometimes I wanted to believe something so badly, I deliberately manufactured excuses and ignored painful reality.

Of course you have to create the conditions of a certain belief. And maybe ignoring something that you don't want to see, at least for the time of the shooting.

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

…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.

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.

Belief creates its own experience; therefore, such an experience is not true.

Belief is harder to shake than knowledge.

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

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self; for what we wish, that we readily believe; but such expectations are often inconsistent with the real state of things.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

We believe whatever we want to believe.