Sylvia Day Quotes

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

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.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

People believed what they wanted to believe, no matter what was right in front of their eyes.

In no way did I allow reality as it was to intrude on reality as I wanted it to be.

We believe what we want to, what we need to. The corollary is that we choose not to see what we'd rather pretend doesn't exist.

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.

Most people like to live in illusions.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

There is the natural tendency that all of us are vulnerable to, to deny unpleasant realities and to look for any excuse to push them away and resolve to think about them another day long in the future.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

One theme we look at is what psychologists call motivated reasoning; lay people refer to it as self-deception, wishful thinking or rationalization. The list of creative ways people have for reaching conclusions they wish to reach and dismissing conclusions they find threatening is amazing. We've shown that it goes down even to the level of visual perception: You literally see what you want to see.

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

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.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

A form of self-delusion.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

So much is man the slave of his heart that he will shut his eyes to what does not please him and believe all that he hopes.

We humans, you see, have an infinite capacity for self-rationalization.

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