Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

I'm a walking contradiction.

The most intolerant advocate is he who is trying to convince himself.

There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.

I'm definitely interested in exploring human contradictions. Contradictions are what make us human - it's what defines us as human beings. Contradictions are what make characters interesting, and I've been lucky to be presented with characters who have a lot of contradictions.

Some of the things I've said, I don't even agree with.

I don't mind a narrator who's self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see.

Even the things we are certain about are only an illusion. We are born with a female side and a male side, and these two sides are always fighting and challenging each other. This is why anything we want to do, we have the other side of telling us not to do it, to be careful about it.

We all live with contradictions.

There are a lot of grey areas in my personality. We all have them.

I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

To be honest I don't really know because I really didn't care when I was writing about mixing up reality with what was not reality.

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.

When you're on your own, you look for signs. Sometimes you make them up, sometimes they're actually there, but most of the time you can't tell the difference from the two.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

Sometimes we have thoughts that even we don’t understand. Thoughts that aren’t even true—that aren’t really how we feel—but they’re running through our heads anyway because they’re interesting to think about. If you could hear other people’s thoughts, you’d overhear things that are true as well as things that are completely random. And you wouldn’t know one from the other. It’d drive you insane. What’s true? What’s not? A million ideas, but what do they mean?

We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.