Ted Dekker Quotes

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

In the long run, it is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the actual fact is.

Truth, when we are fortunate enough to find it, is like bad-tasting medicine. It rarely comes as a pleasant surprise, because if it surprises us, it means we've been denying it for some time and have a lot of beliefs based on falsehood. It's hard to give up those beliefs.

I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented.

Willem, I suspect deep down you know exactly why you're here, exactly what you want, but you're unwilling to the wanting, let alone the having. Because both of those propositions are terrifying.

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.

I am suspicious of guilt in myself and in other people; it is usually a way of not thinking, or of announcing one's own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them fast.

I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!

Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth; left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.

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

I splash my head with ice-cold water and turn to face the mirror. When my image appears I instinctively look away. Is there a truth on the other side that we do not want to see?

Maybe if I act well enough, I'll come to believe it myself.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

Forget your pain. It was what I said when I took Father's hand in the drawing room yesterday, what I repeated again tonight. But I didn't mean this. I must be careful. Yet what bothers me isn't the power of the magic or how, to a person, they've all accepted it as truth. No, what unsettles me the most is how much I want to believe it too.

The only part of you that hurts when you're given the truth is the part that lives on lies.

Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.

Do I really believe that? I make a mark, a few strokes, I argue with myself, not do I like or not, but is it true or not? Is that what I mean, is that what I want?

By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.

Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.

That's fairly common. We don't believe anything we don't want to believe.

The worst derangement of the spirit is to believe things because we want them to be so, not because we have seen them for what they are.

Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay" we say. "I'm alright". But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.

Milton Katselas said, "Who are you to look down your nose at Anna Magnani and Maureen Stapleton? Who do you think you are?" I was doing this kooky meditation at the time called inner-guide meditation, where you go into a cave and you have a guide, and you fly around. So I said to my inner guide, "Take me to the energy that's blocking me from accepting my casting" - because I understood it intellectually, but I didn't want to do it in my heart.