Joko Beck Quotes

What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!

All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

What fools are we, to be besotted with the love of our own trouble, and to hate our liberty and rest!

I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.

If you begin to think you're something you're not, you're looking in the wrong mirror.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

The capacity of this body for self delusion appears to this Senator to be unlimited.

When a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

You can never beat your own mind when it plays tricks on you.

For a long time, I felt that was actually the best I could ever hope for - to pretend to be a good person - because I was quite the opposite.

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I always get the better when I argue alone.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

Like all mad men, I thought everyone was mad except myself.

From what may anyone be saved? Only from themselves! That is, their individual hell. They dig it with their own desires.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

No truly conscious human being sabotages himself - it's impossible, because it's contrary to Nature.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

We'll see who believes in me now. I am the Prankster God - I am killing me!

The trouble with giving yourself a pep talk is, that deep down you know it's all bullshit.

I think it's the ego in us that screws us up.