V. S. Naipaul Quotes

Someone once said to me, 'Some of us choose to live with a lifeboat just a little bit out of our reach.' I'd like to reach a point where I no longer bullshit myself. I think that's the natural human condition - to lie to yourself. Because the truth is painful.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.

I try to find my deepest, often hidden feelings about what's working and what's not. This is difficult because I do lie to myself without being aware that that's what I'm doing.

I was living a life of a lie. And I was doing a lot of things, that hurt a lot of people. And stripping away denial and rationalization you start coming to the truth of who you really are and that can be very ugly.

You can't know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

…we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior.

It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

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.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him.

I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.

Quite simply, it is true that I can be a pig! It is not a lie to say that. Sometimes, I feel that I am in the right even when I am wrong.

When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.

One is never deceived; one deceives oneself.

Why will no man confess his faults? Because he continues to indulge in them; a man cannot tell his dream till he wakes.

Desires should never be justified,' Tehol said, wagging a finger. 'All you end up doing is illuminating the hidden reasons by virtue of their obvious absence.

You're always learning about yourself, if you're honest with yourself. It's very tough to be honest with yourself. We all are dishonest with ourselves, a lot of the time. We don't want to deal with something, so we compartmentalize it.

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

I don't have the delusion that I'm the best or have the right answer. Whenever someone is out there pissed at you or me, they don't even know you or I. What they are really pissed at is themselves. You might have total respect for them but they don't respect themselves.

Don't try to blame the rest of the world. The blame only lies with you. Recognize that immediately.