Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Cultists do not want to admit they have been manipulated by charisma. Nigerian money scheme victims do not want to accept that they had been swindled. To accept those realities is to accept their own faults. Denial of our own weaknesses is something we all suffer from time to time.

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.

It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having.

Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn't do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That's what people do. And that should truly frighten us.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

Our own self-love draws a thick veil between us and our faults.

Hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.

Victims don't want to know they're victims. I guess that's just victim psychology: if you don't know about it, it's not really happening.

People see stories everywhere...We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true...We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

Intelligent people, caught at anything, denied it. Faced with evidence of having denied it falsely, people said they had not done it and had not lied about it, and didn't remember it, but if they had done it, or lied about it, they would have done it and misspoken themselves about it in an interest so much higher as to alter the nature of doing and lying altogether.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.

Someone once said to me, 'Some of us choose to live with a lifeboat just a little bit out of our reach.' I'd like to reach a point where I no longer bullshit myself. I think that's the natural human condition - to lie to yourself. Because the truth is painful.

We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

People readily believe what they want to believe.

The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.

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.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

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

Like the ostrich, head under wingWhen the roaring storm breaks,So many people take refugeUnder the soft pillowOf specious arguments.

Realize that the surface personality has no interest in anything which might disturb its darling delusions.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

Even as your body betrays you, your mind denies it.

It is natural to man to indulge in the illusion of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, till she transforms us into beasts.