Jean Houston Quotes

Few love to hear the sins they love to act.

Our minds sometimes see what our hearts wish were true.

Denial can be a pathology or a survival mechanism - and sometimes it's both.

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

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.

We know how often in our lives through laziness and cowardice we give up the battle and try to hypnotise our minds into the belief that we are brave.

The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it

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.

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

In the denial of that disorder there is order.

The heart lies to itself because it must.

Even as your body betrays you, your mind denies it.

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.

Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexityof the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.

Being a victim is more palatable than having to recognize the intrinsic contradictions of one's own governing philosophy.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

There's nothing like desire to prevent the things one says from having any resemblance to the things in one's mind.

She’d already decided to be with him. If only to wipe him from her mind, get him out of her system and stop the fantasies plaguing her. If only to prove to herself that being with him would not be pleasurable for her.

But when a man suspects any wrong it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing and tried to think nothing.

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