Steven Wright Quotes

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

I lie to myself every day when I tell myself, 'I can skip yoga.'

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Dreams can be like charades in which we act out words rather than see or speak them.

The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies.

The mind is a funny thing in how it works. Sometimes you have to tell yourself what's really true. If you don't, your mind starts trying to tell you lies.

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.

I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.

Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?

If you believe something enough, it comes true eventually, and that's so true even with lies. If you tell yourself a lie, after a few years you'll think it's true.

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

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

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

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.

While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution – so one theory goes – this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us … we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see … Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are – hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones

He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.

What tricks the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.

The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.

The subconscious is like having a laboratory assistant who pretends to love you and help you, but after you go home to go to sleep it goes back into the lab and starts fumbling with the data and destroying it. It's a very tricky thing. People think our minds are us, but that's not true at all. The mind is not us.

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.