"Self-deceit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... plain, If thou attendest not, 'tis just the same As if 'twere all the time removed and far. What marvel, then, that mind doth lose the rest, Save those to which 'thas given up itself? So 'tis that we conjecture from small signs Things wide and weighty, and involve ourselves In snarls of self-deceit. ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... still to understand are the forgeries which real scholars have committed or connived at for the purpose of supporting some opinion which they held with earnestness. There is a vein of madness and self-deceit in the character of the man who half- persuades himself that his own false facts are true. The Payne Collier case is thus one of the most difficult in the world to explain, for it is equally hard to suppose that Mr. Payne Collier was taken in by the notes on the folio ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... week after this that a violent cold hastened the progress of debility into a confirmed malady. He sunk very fast. Aunt Sally, with the self-deceit of a fond and cheerful heart, thought every day that "he would be better," and Uncle Lot resisted conviction with all the obstinate pertinacity of his character, while the sick man felt that he had not ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... few exceptions of the former case are so very few, that we need not now stop to consider them, nor to inquire how far even these would be exceptions if we could read the heart as God reads it. The seeming exceptions being cases either of hypocrisy, or of very common self-deceit, we need not regard either; for they are, of course, no real objection to the truth of the general statement. It remains true, then, generally, that the value of any character is in proportion to the existence, or to the absence, in it of ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... during the long years of her marriage it had grown insensibly stronger and stronger, till now, tyrant and master, with the irresistible strength of conscious power, it could quell with a look all the rest of her nature, rich in colored possibilities of seductive self-deceit, sweet illusions, lovely falsities. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... a Man does not only deceive the World, but very often imposes on himself; That Hypocrisie, which conceals his own Heart from him, and makes him believe he is more virtuous than he really is, and either not attend to his Vices, or mistake even his Vices for Virtues. It is this fatal Hypocrisie and Self-deceit, which is taken notice of in those Words, Who can understand his Errors? cleanse thou ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... armor of his own self-deceit. The bare room seemed suddenly full of glowing images of Fenella. His face ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by no means be considered as edifying patterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and ...
— English literary criticism • Various |
