Daniel Day-Lewis Quotes

I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies.

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

For a little while, maybe I did fall for my own mythology.

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

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.

We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

The easiest person to deceive is one's self.

Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.

I feel like a fraud... My name is not even actually Ashton. Ashton is my middle name.

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

I try to give the appearance that I have it all together and that I know what I'm talking about, but at the end of the day, I think I might be full of crap.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit, since what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

Ideology gives people the illusion of principles and dignity while making it easier for them to part with them.

Self-deception is so far from impossible that it is one of the most ordinary phenomena with which we are acquainted. Nothing is more usual than for a man to impute his actions to honorable motives when it is nearly demonstrable that they flowed from some corrupt and contemptible force.

I felt very comfortable playing Don Draper, because I knew that Don Draper is a character - that Dick Whitman is playing Don Draper. I felt very comfortable in that manufactured-confidence mode. He himself is manufacturing it.

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.

I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

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

How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.

The more intelligent and cultured a man is, the more subtly he can humbug himself.

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

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.

Like the juggler, deceiving by his tricks, one is deluded by egotism, falsehood and illusion.