Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

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

Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies.

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

Human nature is so constituted, that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own.

People lie to themselves all the time about what they've been through and what it means - I'm no exception. But you write those lies down - lies that really matter to you and that are really painful to let go of because they've become a part of who you are - and they don't work.

Every time you think the problem is 'out there,' that very thought is the problem.

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.

I'm not lying to myself like most people.

Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself

We should not be upset that others hide the truth from us, when we hide it so often from ourselves

The hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself. One doesn't like to remember unpleasant details, but forgetting them makes one's life seem disorganized.

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.

Someone once said to me, 'Some of us choose to live with a lifeboat just a little bit out of our reach.' I'd like to reach a point where I no longer bullshit myself. I think that's the natural human condition - to lie to yourself. Because the truth is painful.

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

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.

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