Andy Stanley Quotes

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

You aren't staying in heaven because you still need to purify the mind. Your faith is powerful, but it is invested in what you believe you are, and most of what you believe about yourself is a lie.

Who would you be if you didn't believe this lie?

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

Sometimes the biggest lies we tell are to ourselves.

It's so easy and comfortable to lie to yourself. Success is to become who you are. I think Hollywood thinks in a totally different way. But I think that as a human being, and not only an actress, that's really how you lead a successful life.

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

If I pretend to myself that I'm different from the way I truly am, I'm going to make choices that won't make me happy.

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.

Human beings have the incredible capacity for denial. I think they do. And although it's really hard to believe, I have my doubts. But my feeling is that first they have to convince themselves. First they have to justify this stuff to themselves and if they can do that, even for just the moment that it's coming out their mouth, then they can kind of mouth it with kind of believable sincerity, even if some of us.

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

Tolstoy said, 'The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed either by a change of life or by a change of conscience.' Many of us have elected to adjust our consciences rather than our lives. Our powers of rationalization are unlimited. They allow us to live in luxury and indifference while others, whom we could help if we chose to, starve and go to hell.

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

No one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company.

It's one thing to lie to ourselves. It's another thing to believe it.

One believes in what one wants to believe in.

Do you always want to be right or do you want to be happy?

She wants to believe my excuses so bad. Every time I lie, she wants to believe me so much.

Pursue whatever it is that you want to do with your life. It is the only secret to happiness that I know except for maybe true love, that and maybe having the amazing health insurance plan that our congressmen have.

Your heart knows the truth of openness and suffers the tense lie of your closure.

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

Most of us follow our conscience as we follow a wheelbarrow. We push it in front of us in the direction we want to go.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness.

Your excuses are nothing more than the lies your fears have sold you.

Ninety-five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because we believe all these lies.