Josh Billings Quotes

An illusion which makes me happy is worth a verity which drags me to the ground.

The world loves to be deceived.

When we believe in lies, we cannot see the truth, so we make thousands of assumptions and we take them as truth. One of the biggest assumptions we make is that the lies we believe are the truth!

There is this difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so; but he that thinks himself the wisest, is generally the greatest fool.

That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

Belief is a deception you play upon yourself.

Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that those who choose acting as a profession are phonies who live in a fantasy world. What is surprising is how many of them are blissfully unaware of it.

Storytelling, mythology and film provide a lot of hope but, on the flip side, can also create delusion.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

The world wants to be deceived.

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.

I don't think I'm alone in this: I'm obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.

You can blame your whole confusion on the fact that you bought illusion.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that, if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

It was just perfect, just right all at once.