"Self-deception" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exaggeration and distortion which marked the view she took of her conduct. He saw it would involve lowering the high integrity of her ideal conceptions respecting delicacy and honor—hardly worth while, merely for the sake of explaining the distinction between a trifling piece of self-deception and mistaken vanity, and the severe and unrelenting sentence which Sophie had passed upon herself. Meanwhile, every word she had uttered had been an indirect, but none the less telling blow upon a sore place in his own conscience. It was ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... the good man, who at the very moment was pondering over the art of self-deception, as practised by ourselves upon ourselves. "No, thank you; but do, my dear madam, imbue those children with a contented spirit; there is nothing that keeps us so truly at peace with the world as contentment—or with ourselves, for ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... letter, with something it is feared, if not of duplicity, of self-deception, extols the skill of his surgeon, in having gradually lessened his consumption of laudanum, it was understood, to twenty drops a day. With this diminution, the habit was considered as subdued, and at which result, no one appeared to rejoice more than Mr. Coleridge himself. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... being, or even make him feel the magnetic current that flows through us all, and by which we are able to exist; all the rappings and table-turnings are mere hysterical imaginations, or worse—the cheapest form of either trickery or self-deception that can be. Barty, your unborn children are of a moment to me beyond anything you can realize or imagine, and Julia must be their mother; Julia Royce, and no other woman ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... understand, and suddenly. The problem was subtler than he had thought. Weakness was at the core of it, weakness revealed in self-deception and self-accusation alike, the weakness of the finical dreamer, the man with the unrobust conscience. But the weakness which Lewis arraigned himself on was the very obvious failing of the diffident and the irresolute. Wratislaw tried ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... when a child: "Look my master, behold this great kingdom! It is all for you, it belongs to you, you are its master!"—Undoubtedly, to swallow and digest such gross irony people must be half-fools or half-brutes; but it is exactly their capacity for self-deception which makes them different from the sensible or passive crowd and casts them into a band whose ascendancy is irresistible. Convinced that a street mob is entitled to absolute rule and that the nation expresses its sovereignty through ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... tell when it ended Enjoy the name without the gain Enough is as good as a feast Escaped shot and shell to fall less gloriously beneath champagne Every misfortune has an end at last Exclaimed with Othello himself, "Chaos was come again;" Fearful of a self-deception where so much was at stake Fighting like devils for conciliation Finish in sorrow what you have begun in folly Gardez vous des femmes, and more especially if they be Irish Green silk, "a little off the grass, and on the bottle" Had a most remarkable talent for selecting a son-in-law ...
— Quotes and Images From The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer • Charles James Lever |
