Upton Sinclair Quotes

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.

It seems that nature, which has so wisely disposed our bodily organs with a view to our happiness, has also bestowed on us pride, to spare us the pain of being aware of our imperfections.

What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit.

One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

Human beings, from their own point of view, are very different than what people see.

There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.

People aren't interested in seeing themselves as they really are.

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Who you are and what you think of yourself is constantly changing.

People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

If I were a chocolate I'd eat myself. Seriously, we're all interested in ourselves and what other people are saying about us to some extent.

Most people have a time-bound awareness. And the reason is they have sacrificed their self for their self-image.

The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.

...Every ego so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though is was a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares this delusion.

If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were.

When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.

Man is bound to lie about himself

No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.

There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

Each person tells you who they think they are, and who they think you are.

The way you see me is the way I am.

I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.