Scott Westerfeld Quotes

A fear is just a lie that you've rehearsed so many times you believe it's true.

It's amazing how we can make ourselves believe what we want to.

What bugs me is that you believe what you're saying. What bothers me is that you don't know how you feel. What scares me is that while you're telling me stories, you actually believe that they are real.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

You can convince yourself of just about anything when you want to believe a conspiracy theory.

People see stories everywhere...We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true...We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we'd go crazy.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.

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

With how much ease believe we what we wish!

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.

For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.

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.

It's one thing to lie to ourselves. It's another thing to believe it.

If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

Still, you tend to believe what you always believed, think what you always thought, expect what you always expected

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self; for what we wish, that we readily believe; but such expectations are often inconsistent with the real state of things.

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

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

We see what we want to believe.