self-deception

Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.

People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they're children.

Reality blithely ignores the lies we tell ourselves about it.

The truth is that our self-deceptive lies range from seemingly tiny untruths to massive life-altering falsehoods about reality.

My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

What further helps to reveal reality is when our personal thinking ceases to take reality for granted.

Stop lying to yourself. When we deny our own truth, we deny our own potential.

The notion of the perfect time is more than myth. It's the ultimate self-delusion.

Fantasy and drama appeal to us. They are socially acceptable and make you feel good about yourself. Moreover, you get rewarded for being cleverly ignorant.

Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending.

I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.

Sometimes, we expect life to work a certain way and when it doesn__ we blame others or see it as a sign, rather than face the pain of the choices we should or shouldn__ have made. Real healing won__ begin until we stop saying, __od prevented this or that._ Often in our attempt to protect ourselves from pain, we leave things to fate and don__ take chances. Or, we don__ work hard enough to keep the blessings we are given. Maybe, we didn't recognize a blessing, until it was too late. Often, it is the lies we tell ourselves that keeps us stuck in a delusion of not being responsible for our lives. We leave it all up to God. The truth is we are not leaves blowing toward our destiny without any control. To believe this is to take away our freedom of choice and that of others. The final stage of grief is acceptance. This can__ be reached through always believing God willed the outcomes in our lives, despite our inaction or actions. To think so is to take the easy escape from our accountability. Sometimes, God has nothing to do with it. Sometimes, we just screwed up and guarded our heart from accepting it, by putting our outcome on God as the reason it turned out the way it did. Faith is a beautiful thing, but without work we can give into a mysticism of destiny that really doesn't teach us lessons or consequences for our actions. Life then becomes a distorted delusion of no accountability with God always to blame for battles we walked away from, won or loss.

One major cost of self-deception is that we use painful life experiences to justify being non-ideal versions of ourselves.

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.

The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at the bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting for us in the next room.

People are always talking about it being their duty to find their way to their fellow men _ to their neighbour, as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false sentiment _ when in fact it is purely and simply a question of finding their way to themselves. Let each first find his way to himself! And since hardly anyone has yet found his way to himself, it is inconceivable that any of these unfortunate millions has ever found his way to another human being _ or to his neighbour, as they say, dripping with self-deception.

Time and time over it is the ones who try a little too hard to be innovative rebels - and for the sheer glory of being considered innovative rebels - who then turn out not quite as innovative or as rebellious as they would like to think they are.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.