Francis Bacon Quotes

People readily believe what they want to believe.

What a man wishes, he will believe.

It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires.

We are all very ready to believe what we like.

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

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.

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 average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

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.

Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.

The first step to believing something is true is wanting to believe it is true... or being afraid it is.

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.

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

When it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

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

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

So much is man the slave of his heart that he will shut his eyes to what does not please him and believe all that he hopes.

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

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.

I told myself it was the snow—she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.

We are eager to believe that others are flawed because we are eager to believe in what we wish for.