Lindsay Ellis Quotes

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.

To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.

Nobody's perfect, and to try to pretend you're perfect is an exhausting fool's errand.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

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

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

I'm willing to admit that I may not always be right, but I am never wrong.

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.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

Our own self-love draws a thick veil between us and our faults.

The mind is a funny thing in how it works. Sometimes you have to tell yourself what's really true. If you don't, your mind starts trying to tell you lies.

A protective self-narrative during conflict and duress sometimes obscures us from seeing the worst in ourselves. When the self-sustaining haze lifts after that conflict has subsided, we may recognize in ourselves the flaws the other saw in us at the time that we didn't have the emotional bandwidth to examine in the moment.

My greatest strength is to have a great capacity to confront myself no matter how unpleasant. My greatest weakness is that I don't. I know that's enigmatic, but that's sort of a general formula for anyone, actually.

I am suspicious of guilt in myself and in other people; it is usually a way of not thinking, or of announcing one's own fine sensibilities the better to be rid of them fast.

I like to hide behind my intellect. But the truth is, unless all of us start getting honest about what the reality is, things aren't going to change. If we all keep pretending that we know stuff and if everyone else would do what we knew and everything would be a better place, then nothing is going to change.

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having.

Only a man who cannot conquer his deficiencies feels the need to convince the world that he has none.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

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.

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.

You don't accept your weaknesses the same way that you love the weaknesses of another artist, because when they make mistakes they don't look like weaknesses.