Svetlana Alliluyeva Quotes

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

I will sit in the pupil of your eyes and that will carry your sight into the heart of the things

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

One of the greatest enemies to vision is sight!

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.

Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free – he is his own trap.

Truth may sometimes hurt, but delusion harms.

The time has come for honest men to denounce false teachers and attack false gods.

There are conditions worse than being unable to see, and that is imagining one sees.

If we took as much pains to be what we ought, as we do to deceive others by disguising what we are; we might appear as we are, without being at the trouble of any disguise.

The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

Every man is wholly honest to himself and to God, but not to any one else.

We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

the problem with knowing is that it takes away the possibility of pretending!

Truth is so impossible. Something has to be done for it.

We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.

The more you act the further you get away from the truth.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Life is the art of being well deceived.