deception on Lying to Yourself

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to ...

We may find it hard to believe Jeremiah’s words that the heart is “deceitful above all things.” We would rather look outward and think, Yes, others may be quite foolish and misguided. But I have a ...

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.

Most of us recognize that self-deception hampers our ability to grow and live healthy lives. The Arbinger Institute takes it a bit further in their best-selling book Leadership and Self-Deception ...

At some point in childhood we all make the powerful discovery that we can manipulate the truth about ourselves.

Our propensity to deceive ourselves about our place and purpose makes it so very difficult to see the truth of our lives, to understand the meaning of our moment in history and our responsibility to i...

Evading self-acknowledgment of our faults enables us to avoid painful moral emotions: guilt and remorse for harming others; shame for betraying your own ideals; self-contempt for not meeting even our ...

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.

The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But n...

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

The most insidious deception in human history is the lie that says, “God is against you.”

Our goodness is our biggest self-delusion, and all of us seem to be living with it.

My friend Joi told me that when she was growing up, her parents invented a ploy to keep her from talking all of the time. They told her that people are allowed only so many words in one lifetime, and ...

Holy and merciful God, we need Your grace and love today. We deliberately lie and speak falsehoods. We mislead and deceive with half-truths. We omit facts that make us look bad. We take pleasure in go...

He wonders if he’s lying. If he is, he is hung in the middle of nowhere, and the thought hollows him.

Our race would not have gotten far, Had we not learned to bluff it out And look more certain than we are Of what our motion is about.

Billy is a seven-year-old boy who loves to draw pictures. But he’s not your typical seven-year-old who likes to draw. He has an unmatched talent as an artist. The pictures he sketches are riveting. Bi...

We love to think that we're rational—that our take on the world is correct—and that if we were being dishonest with ourselves... we'd know. However, there's good reason to think that we...

We will often stop at nothing to avoid cognitive dissonance. We will twist logic, bend reason, conveniently forget facts, invent new stories, even destroy relationships—all in the name of preserving o...

It’s important, then, to have our eyes open to this deception. How is it that so many modern promises sound true but in the end lead to our deception, or even our destruction? A long, long time ago, t...

[The flattery of others] is narcotic and addictive. It preys on two desperate and inescapable desires; to be thought well of by others and to think well of ourselves … We desire and need approbation s...

When Quentin Rowan published his first spy novel, Assassin of Secrets , it was initially received with glowing reviews. But five days after its release, it became clear that the novel had been al...

The greatest of all illusions is the illusion of familiarity.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.