Mary Elizabeth Braddon Quotes

Sometimes our weakness is considered strength, and we take delight in borrowed greatness.

Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

The fundamental factor of self-deception is this constant desire to be something in this world and in the world hereafter.

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.

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.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit.

A form of self-delusion.

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.

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.

Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

Sometimes when you're at your most certain, that's when everything you know is wrong.

It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.

Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.

An inflated balloon -- impressive to look at but hollow at the core and easily punctured.

It is easier to deceive yourself, and to do so unperceived, than to deceive another.

Boasting, like gilded armour, is very different inside from outside.

To awaken a man who is deceived as to his own merit is to do him as bad a turn as that done to the Athenian madman who was happy in believing that all the ships touching at the port belonged to him.

Of all forms of deception self-deception is the most deadly, and of all deceived persons the self-deceived are the least likely to discover the fraud.