Blaise Pascal Quotes

What is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism..

Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that, if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

A lie to me is a dream that might come true.

I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me.

I think people need fantasy, but I think they also need to know that they're not being lied to. I think sometimes the fantasy can betray people and become more difficult for people's lives than just truth. I can't stand delusion. Delusion makes me sick.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

Storytelling, mythology and film provide a lot of hope but, on the flip side, can also create delusion.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

I love to invent - avoiding the truth. I need to dramatize.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

No one who lives in error is free.

It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

The great enemy of the truth is often not the lie ... but the myth.

Let me tell you the truth. The truth is what is, and what should be is a fantasy. A terrible, terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago.

People don't really want reality. They want theater, and that's different.

There's so many different types of illusions; our lives are an illusion in a sense.

There's a difference between a cheap lie and a beautiful lie.

Nothing in this book is true.