"Self-deception" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me what perhaps could only have come as it did—through fire and cloud and storm. I did not will it so, indeed, I did not wish it so, as you know; but it came in spite of all. And I shall speak to you of it as to my own soul. I want no illusions, no self-deception, no pretense to be added to my debt to you. With wide-open eyes I want to look at it. I know that this love of mine for you is my fate, the first and the last passion of my soul. And to have known ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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
... not seen that only her pride and her vanity were engaged in the struggle, and her heart not at all, I think I should have abandoned my comfortable self-deception that my own pride forbade discussion with her. As it was, I was able to say: "Don't try to spare me, Carlotta, I'm glad you had the courage and the good sense not to let us both drift into irrevocable folly. ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... expression of the Duc de Villeroy to Louis XIV. 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 its gatherings, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... knew of his temperament she guessed that once she began to thaw he would forthwith whirl her into July. She must be prepared to accept that, however—repellent though the thought was—she assured herself it was most repellent. She prided herself on her skill at catching and checking herself in self-deception; but it somehow did not occur to her to contrast her rather listless previous planning with the energy and interest she at once put into this project for supreme martyrdom, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... them grow.' If, that is, I am forced to confess that poetry and romance are absent, I will resolutely stick to it that poetry and romance are bad things, even though the love of them is the strongest propensity of my nature. To my thinking, there is something almost pathetic in this loyal self-deception; and therefore I have never been offended by certain passages in 'Our Old Home' which appear to have caused some irritation in touchy Englishmen. There is something, he says by way of apology, which causes an American in England to take up an attitude ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... volume of an exciting novel English maids are domesticated savage animals Every woman that's married isn't in love with her husband Eyes of a lover are not his own; but his hands and lips are Good nature, and means no more harm than he can help Graduated naturally enough the finer stages of self-deception Have her profile very frequently while I am conversing with her He was in love, and subtle love will not be shamed and smothered I did, replied Evan. 'I told a lie.' Is he jealous? 'Only when I make him, he is.' Make ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... known very clearly what qualities she had wanted in Comus, and she had known, against all efforts at self-deception, that he fell far short of those qualities. She had been willing to lower her standard of moral requirements in proportion as she was fond of the boy, but there was a point beyond which she ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... business, and we excuse them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched, human entity, whose whole profession it is to take a tub for a fortified town and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto, and who passes three-fourths of his time in a dream and the rest in open self-deception, and we expect him to be as nice upon a matter of fact as a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less than decent. You do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift he is to weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that he cares ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lamentations over deceived hopes and unfulfilled aspirations, by painful realization of the imperfection and perishability of all earthly things, and the insignificance and transitoriness of life, in a word, by Weltschmerz, in its purest, ideal form, not merely self-deception and irony turned against one's own soul life, but a profoundly solemn emotion, springing from sublime pity for the misery of the world read by the light of personal trials and sorrows. He sang not of a mistress' blue ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... peace beginning to be established he had sacrificed his argument for the sake of public tranquillity. Now, however, that it may be useful to the development of the King he brings it forth again. The direct address to James is full of that curious self-deception or defective insight which is so common among those who have the training of a pupil of great importance in the world. The boy had grown beyond the age of personal chastisement; he had reached that in which the precocious facility of comprehension, which is so strongly ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... that their eyes are unlike, or, as often happens, that one eye does all the close range work. Even when being tested, eyes will seem to see easily what requires a great effort of "accommodation." To prevent this self-deception skilled oculists do not trust the eye card, but put a drug in the eye that benumbs the muscles of accommodation. They cannot contract or expand if they want to. The oculist then studies the length of the eye and the muscle of accommodation. With this absolute knowledge of how each ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... pouring out a cup of cold tea, began his meal, ever and anon stopping to listen, with a puzzled face, to a continuous squeaking overhead. It sounded like several pairs of new boots all squeaking at once, but Mr. Vickers, who was a reasonable man and past the age of self-deception, sought for ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... more—as for any real interchange of sympathies, any genuine feeling of friendliness, of respect, or even of regard—all that was utterly out of the question. The avowal is cynical, no doubt; but it is at any rate straightforward, and above all it is peculiarly devoid of any trace of self-deception. In the face of these trenchant sentences, the view of Frederick's attitude which is suggested so assiduously by Carlyle—that he was the victim of an elevated misapprehension, that he was always hoping ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... each of us the qualities of the other, and we can say "that morality in Smith's sense, just as Feuerbach taught later, is only reflected self-interest, although Smith himself was quite unwilling to look at sympathy as an egotistic principle. By means of a process that we can almost call a kind of self-deception of the imagination, we must look at ourselves with the eyes of others, a very sensible precaution of nature, which thus has created a balance for impulses that otherwise must have operated detrimentally. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... and ill at ease; and you and I are talking at cross purposes, groping, evading, fencing with words. If there is nothing significant in the friendship we gave each other from the hour we met—it is not worth the self-deception you are ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... calmly reflected, for Philip's love was tranquil, though deep and steady, and the rather sought to preserve Laura as she was than to make her anything more; and this very calmness contributed to his self-deception on this first occasion that he had ever actually swerved ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... insignificant. These Catharists did indeed go the length of expelling all so-called mortal sinners, because it was too crying an injustice to treat libellatici more severely than unabashed transgressors;[249] but, even then, it was still a gross self-deception to style themselves the "pure ones," since the Novatian Churches speedily ceased to be any stricter than the Catholic in their renunciation of the world. At least we do not hear that asceticism and devotion to religious ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... coin. Ambiguity of design with much propriety he makes to overflow with the most praiseworthy principles; and sage maxims are not unfrequently put in the mouth of stupidity, to show how easily such common-place truisms may be acquired. Nobody ever painted so truthfully as he has done the facility of self-deception, the half self-conscious hypocrisy towards ourselves, with which even noble minds attempt to disguise the almost inevitable influence of selfish motives in human nature. This secret irony of the characterization commands admiration as the profound abyss of acuteness ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... will be seen later, was the whole suggestion that any peace could have been had with the South except on the terms of separation. Vallandigham, a demagogue of real vigour, had perhaps so much honesty as is compatible with self-deception; at any rate, upon his subsequent visit to the South his intercourse with Southern leaders was conducted on the footing that the Union should be restored. But his character inspired no respect. Burnside, now commanding the troops in Ohio, held that violent denunciation ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the democracy and unselfishness of Jesus Christ is so small and unimportant as to be fit subject for jest in Sunday supplements and in Punch, Life, Le Rire, and Fliegende Blaetter. In her foreign mission work the extraordinary self-deception of white religion is epitomized: solemnly the white world sends five million dollars worth of missionary propaganda to Africa each year and in the same twelve months adds twenty-five million dollars worth of the vilest gin manufactured. Peace to the ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... imagination he had long regarded himself as the possessor of those Penza and Nizhegorod estates and had apportioned the use of the income from them. Julie saw Boris' indecision, and sometimes the thought occurred to her that she was repulsive to him, but her feminine self-deception immediately supplied her with consolation, and she told herself that he was only shy from love. Her melancholy, however, began to turn to irritability, and not long before Boris' departure she formed ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... infinitely superior to any particular class, whether it be capital or whether it be labour. Organised labour stands in the way to gain much by intelligent and honest work and orderly procedure. And to a degree perhaps never before equalled, does it stand in a position to lose much if through self-deception on its own part or through unworthy leadership, it deceives itself in believing itself superior to the forces of law ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... nature some startling secret—". . . a tincture of force to flush old age with youth, or breed gold, or imprison moonbeams till they change to opal shafts!" At the same time with that capacity for self-deception which characterizes the true mystic he ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... certainty to axioms, which the ancient religionists did to creeds, nor allow the mind, which ever strives to insulate itself and its acquisitions, to forget the nature of the process by which it substituted scientific for common notions, and so with one as with the other lay the basis of self-deception by a pedantic and superstitious employment ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Aylmer's love-making to be harmless. He was so easily carried away. His feelings were impulsive. Yet it was only a very short time since Vincy had told her of Aylmer's miserable letter. Edith was not interested in herself, and seldom thought much of her own feelings, but she hated self-deception; and now she faced facts. She adored Aylmer! It had been purely jealousy that made her write to Paris so touchingly, asking him to come back—vague fears that, if he were so depressed in Spain, perhaps he might try by amusements to forget her in Paris. He had once said to her that, of all ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... clung still to that self-deception, without which he never could have been entrapped into an earthly passion; he never breathed a word of love to her. It would have alarmed her; it would have alarmed himself. Every syllable that passed between these two might have been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... of her people.' 'In the union of patriotism with religion I know no nation which can approach them.' There could be no doubt in any reasonable mind of her real and lasting strength. But her unlimited power of self-deception; the necessary instability of a policy resting upon the will of a single man; her misgovernment of Poland and her alienation of Bulgaria, constituted dangers which it was idle to ignore. He, however, set against these weaknesses her popularity with all the Slav ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... is hope for any man, however blind he be, who will humbly lay himself at Jesus' feet. Let this be my prayer, O Lord, "Cleanse Thou me from secret faults." Deliver me from self-deception, save me from confusing the fixed light of heaven with the wandering beacon-lights of hell. And again and again will I pray, "Lord, that ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... Fate which are symbolized by the game. She desires intensely to win, and she will not be above shifting a card or two in contravention of the known rules. Far am I from intimating that this puts upon her the stigma of moral delinquency. It is mere testimony, rather, to her astounding capacity for self-deception. And this I cannot believe to be other than gracious of influence upon the intricate muddle ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... a little difficult to do so?" This was a probe that went even deeper than the questioner knew. Mr. Lyon hesitated, seeing again as in a vision the astonishment of his family. He was conscious of an attempt at self-deception when ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... first, but I was never angry. What of it, if, with a sort of sweet absurdity, she talked in great agitation of the depravity of hearts, of the sin of light-mindedness, of the self-deception which leads men astray—a confused but purposeful jumble, in which occasional allusions to the errors of Rome, and to the want of seriousness in the upper classes, put in ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... I felt myself, like St. Augustine, but a "seller of rhetoric." I was inculcating a method of life which I myself did not obey, or obeyed only in those respects that caused me neither sacrifice nor inconvenience. In order to continue such labours at all various forms of excuse and self-deception were required. Thus I flattered myself that I was at least maintaining the authority of morals. I did not perceive that morals are of no value to the world until vitalized by emotion. At other times I preached with strenuous zeal the superiority of the Christian religion, and dilated on ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... a closer acquaintance with facts might cure him of an infatuation against which pride and inherited instinct had rebelled ill vain: and so intricate are the mazes of self-deception, that he firmly believed in his own desire ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... wall was more gloomy than darkness, when the nurse, hired to assist his own man in these last days, dozed in her comfortable chair, the truth came hope to his shallow soul, and Horatio Paget knew that he had been indeed a sinner, and very vile among sinners. Then, for a moment, the veil of self-deception was lifted, and he saw his past life as it had really been,—selfish, dishonourable, cruel beyond measure in reckless injury of others. For a moment the awful book was opened, and the sinner saw the fearful ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... One self-deception leads to another. Miss Mangles sat down and accepted Lady Orlay's invitation in the full and perfect conviction that she owed it to ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... on Etna and Other Poems. Empedocles on Etna. The River. Excuse. Indifference. Too Late. On the Rhine. Longing. The Lake. Parting. Absence. Destiny. (Not reprinted.) To Marguerite. Human Life. Despondency. Youth's Agitations—A Sonnet. Self-Deception. Lines written by a Death-bed. (Afterward, Youth and Calm.) Tristram and Iseult. Memorial Verses. (Previously published in Fraser's Magazine.) Courage. (Not reprinted.) Self-Dependence. A Summer Night. The Buried ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... towards the drawing-room in her best black silk dress, and in what might have been called a fluster of excitement at the thought of a visitor, if such a word had been applicable to her placid life of self-deception. Juanita made some small jest and laughed rather eagerly at it as she passed the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... their weight; and except for them, it is not to be supposed that Henry would have permitted private distaste or inclination to induce him to create a scandal in Europe. In his conduct, however, as in that of most men, good was chequered with evil, and sincerity with self-deception. Personal feeling can be traced from the first, holding a subsidiary, indeed, but still an influential place, among his motives; and exactly so far as he was influenced by it, his course was wrong, as the consequence miserably proved. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... And you know what your answer was. Not a sign in you that you would stand by me if the worst came. I knew then what I had to look forward to, but I durst not believe it. I kept saying to myself: "She loves me, and as soon as she really understands—" That was all self-deception. If I had been a wise man, I should have spoken to you in a way you couldn't mistake. I should have told you that we were living recklessly, and that I had determined to alter it. I have no delicacy? No regard for your feelings? Oh, if I had had less! I doubt whether you can even understand ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... not mean that all who have written or spoken on the subject had this conception of it, but I believe they who thought truly meant this; they did not suppose that in imputing righteousness there was a kind of figment, a self-deception in the mind of God; they did not mean that by an act of will He chose to consider that every act which Christ did was done by us; that He imputed or reckoned to us the baptism in Jordan and the victory in the wilderness, and the agony in the garden, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... apparent that he was fully awake to the terror of his own situation; that he pierced the depths of the abyss into which he had fallen, in which he lay crippled, prisoned, ruined. Yet a hope had dawned on him with the dawning of the full knowledge of his fall, of his fantastic self-deception. The great love in this woman's eyes shone down into the abyss, shone from that face pinched by starvation. There was Heaven in it. There was the flame. Yes, he saw it now, not literally as in the past days, when its mystery had plunged him in ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... are now and then projected which it is the duty of a parent to oppose; but there are two kinds of opposition, a conscientious and sorrowful opposition, and an egotistical and captious opposition, and men and women, in their self-deception, may sometimes mistake the one for the other. 'Marry your daughters lest they marry themselves, and run off with the ploughman or the groom' is an axiom of worldly wisdom. Marry your daughters, if you can do so ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... human 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 ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... in extremes. As they are one moment capable of higher courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser depression, and it is often a matter of chance whether numbers shall multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does deception lead more surely to distrust of men than self-deception to suspicion of principles. The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but the statesman needs something more durable to work in,—must ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy the want of luxuries only because I cannot get them; but if my self-deception be useful to me, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... please others, against my own inclination, against my own conscience, must be weakness indeed—self-deception; for if my friends wish my happiness, and I make myself miserable, how can that please them? Any sacrifice I could make, except that of principle, I would; but that I never will make, nor will my friends, nor do they, desire it—Forgive ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... end. And then, for the first time, seeing her there, helpless and terrified, in her forlorn prettiness, he deceived himself no longer, wrapped up his tenderness for the woman, his angry pity for her misery that was coming, in no false terms. Such self-deception, honest as it had been, was no longer possible. He knew now that he loved her, and all that his love had been—the very salt and savour of life to him, the one delicious and adorable pain relieving the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... our religion, trying to get all good things for ourselves, and caring nothing for others; if we pray only for ourselves, if we work only for ourselves, if we live only for ourselves, if we see others in want, yet shut up our compassion, how dwelleth the love of God in us? Away with such self-deception, my brothers, if any one of us seems to be religious, and yet stretches out no helping hand to his brother, that man's religion is vain. When we see a fellow man fallen among thieves, and lying by the wayside of life, what do we do? Do ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... undiseased body to be ill. Her reason is distorted by her disease-obsessions; her will has been pampered into a selfish caricature. She has accepted the false counsel of her selfishness so long that she is attracted by error, and repelled by truth. I see relief for her only through the culminating self-deception that disease does not exist. If this error is accepted by her, she will become as fanatically superior to her wretched sensations as she is now subservient to them. In other words, she is a worse than useless woman whom Christian ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... such self-deception as this, he was about to throw the wood from him before he re-entered the place, when ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... it is not a question of whether the opponent is a noble opponent, of equal birth, or an interesting opponent; it is a question of meeting him. It is thus imperative that the Germans should have no opportunity for self-deception and resignation. The real pressure must be made more oppressive by making men conscious of the pressure, and the disgrace more ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... a fine thing to be a great scientist, but it is a yet finer thing to be a great man. The one element in Huxley's life that makes his character stand out clear, sharp and well defined was his steadfast devotion to truth. The only thing he feared was self-deception. When he uttered his classic cry in defense of Darwin, there was no ulterior motive in it; no thought that he was attaching himself to a popular success; no idea that he was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... high-wrought and desponding tone which often characterizes extraordinary genius, and too sincere to trifle with impunity, struggled then fruitlessly against a fatality formerly imagined, but become real; and the flower of his life was passed amid illusions and conflicts, in alternate self-deception and self-reproach, in wild and beautiful visions from which he awoke to sickness of heart and weariness of himself and all things, like the victim of a powerful opiate. Compromising weakly between his passion and his conscience, he would say, he secluded ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... meet you in the hall. Oh, my dear, I am so very grateful to you for these precious jewels, and more than all for the friendship and kindness that prompted the gift," said Rose; and perhaps she really did believe that she prized the giver more than the gift; for such self-deception would have been in keeping with ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... day is supported on two sides: by false religion and by false science. And it has reached such proportions that if we were not living in its midst, we could not believe that men could attain such a pitch of self-deception. Men of the present day have come into such an extraordinary condition, their hearts are so hardened, that seeing they see not, hearing they do ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it might be as rotten as manure—and also as fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction; it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle or the doubling of the hare; as fictitious, as efficient, and as indispensable. It is vain to call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said that all existence was a self-deception; and Shaw's only further comment seems to be that it is right to be deceived. To Man and Superman, as to all his plays, the author attaches a most ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... impossible, to condemn a minister as the responsible person. Yet however difficult it is to reconcile such avowed motives with the known facts, the avowal always has about it a tone of conviction which can only have been the outcome of successful self-deception. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... the doctor just how much value he placed on that life. But to what purpose? Doctors lived in their own peculiar atmosphere of conceit and self-deception, crowing like a hen over a new-laid egg whenever they chanced to bring back a soul to the miseries from which it had struggled to escape. It would be a waste of words, for Norris would never understand. Would Marion? Cold terror seized him at the thought of the coming, the inevitable ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... and secondary automatism! It must be so—Haeckel, thou reasonest well. But when the "old Injun" and my High- Dutch ancestor are upon me, I reason not at all, and then I see visions and dream dreams, and it always comes true, without the least self-deception or delusion. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... yield much of its entireness and intimacy to the influence of new ties; but for their lives ever being joined together, as had sometimes been his wild dreams, his cheek, though alone, burned with the consciousness of his folly and self-deception. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... have been more careful, or more lucky"—meaning less fraudulent, or more skilful—"with the hidden wealth of Simancas than he has been with regard to materials which are more generally accessible. I trust it may prove so." If Freeman thought that he meant that, he must have had singular powers of self-deception. "I have been twitted by men of thought and learning"—whom he does not name—"for letting Mr. Froude off too easily, and I am inclined to plead guilty to the charge. I do not suppose that Mr. Froude wilfully misrepresents ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... but it was in my head that she meant to indicate the corridors below and that unknown danger which iron doors shut down. I had been a clearer-headed man that morning if I could have put away from me my doubt of what the depths were hiding from us. But I hid it from her always. A truce of self-deception shut out the question as one we neither cared to hear ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... it now with full certainty, but it seems to me that all their life of this so-called freedom is a continuous self-deception and falsehood. The life of each of these people, whom I have seen during these days, is moving in a strictly defined circle, which is just as solid as the corridors of our prison, just as closed as the dial of the watches ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... Aylmer sat in his wife's presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments. Until now he had not been aware of the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea over his mind, and of the lengths which he might find in his heart to go for the sake of ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... the generosity which he so earnestly and sedulously praised. At least it will be advisable for the moment to assume that he pictured himself as generous Antonio, without difficulty or conscious self-deception. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... been trying to see things from his standpoint. By a sort of mental ju-jutsu I've even been trying to justify what I can't quite understand in him. But it's no use. There's one bald, hard fact I can't escape, no matter how I dig my old ostrich-beak of instinct under the sands of self-deception. There's one cold-blooded truth that will have to be faced. My husband is no longer in love with me. Whatever else may have happened, I have lost my heart-hold on Duncan Argyll McKail. I am still his wife, in the eyes of the law, and the mother of his children. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... Self-deception was not one of Marion's faults; she grew so quickly regretful for what had happened, that when Miss Ashton came to her door, troubled by the girl's tired look on her arrival, she found her with red eyes and a ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... they are often peculiarly favoured with seasons of great comfort, to counterbalance their dejections, yet they never hear or read of those who 'have drawn back to perdition,' but they are terrified with the idea that they shall shortly resemble them; so that every warning given against hypocrisy or self-deception seems to point them out by name, and every new discovery of any fault or mistake in their views, temper, or conduct, seems to decide their doom. At the same time, they are often remarkably melted into humble, admiring gratitude, by contemplating the love and sufferings of Christ, and seem to delight ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... half an hour; which they must necessarily do, or no tragedy could be carried on, unless they had recourse to a much greater absurdity, the choruses of the ancients. Tragedy is of a nature, that one must see it with a degree of self-deception; we must lend ourselves a little to the delusion; and I am very willing to carry that complaisance a little ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... to the ancient times of the Romans while I censure our own. And, indeed, were not the excellence which then prevailed and the corruption which prevails now clearer than the sun, I should proceed more guardedly in what I have to say, from fear lest in accusing others I should myself fall into this self-deception. But since the thing is so plain that every one sees it, I shall be bold to speak freely all I think, both of old times and of new, in order that the minds of the young who happen to read these my writings, may be led to shun modern examples, and be prepared to follow those set by antiquity ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... a cruel thing to say to the unlearned and the multitude, 'Believe, and you are at once saved; do not wait for fruits, rejoice at once,' and neither to accompany this announcement by any clear description of what faith is, nor to secure them by previous religious training against self-deception!" ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... beyond human strength and courage—as one finds it—is it not better for a man that he engage in some straightforward comparatively harmless cheating, than if he risk his mental integrity in some ambiguous position and fall at last into self-deception and self-righteousness? That is the essential danger. That is the thing I always guard against. Heed that! It is the master ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing[2] and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you to the ends of the earth is no more interesting than living with any Anfissa or Akulina. There's the same smell of ironing, of powder, and of medicines, the same curl-papers every morning, the same self-deception." ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of his frank pleasure in seeing me I was ashamed to analyze the nature of the change; but presently our talk began to flag—fancy a talk with Merrick flagging!—and self-deception became impossible as I watched myself handing out platitudes with the gesture of the salesman offering something to a purchaser "equally good." The worst of it was that Merrick—Merrick, who had once felt ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... I said to him in somber anger. "I proposed to put before her the fact of my own weakness, of my own self-deception, which also was deception of her. I ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... for a long time. The fatal result of being long out of work follows: he becomes less and less eager for it, and gets a "job" less and less frequently. In order to keep up his self-respect, and still more to keep his wife's respect for him, he yields to the little self-deception that this prolonged idleness follows because he was once blacklisted, and he gradually becomes a martyr. Deep down in his heart perhaps—but who knows what may be deep down in his heart? Whatever may be in his wife's, she does not show for an instant that she thinks he has ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... blind love: because what is that, really, but the animal at its craftiest and most dangerous? what is romance—I mean romance of the kind that jeopardizes 'goodness'—what is it but the most subtle self-deception? You don't love the person in the true sense of love; you don't want their good; you don't want to see them put in the right relation to their life as a whole:—what you want is sensation through them; what you want is yourself ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... summer which we have spent together. I see it now! I am awake, disenchanted, disinthralled! Self, self, self! You have embodied yourself in a project. You are a better masquerader than the witches and gypsies yonder; for your disguise is a self-deception. See whither it has brought you! First, you aimed a death-blow, and a treacherous one, at this scheme of a purer and higher life, which so many noble spirits had wrought out. Then, because Coverdale could not be quite your slave, you threw him ruthlessly ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thinking determined by a complex of whose action he is unconscious, but that he believes his thoughts to be the result of other causes which are in reality insufficient and illusory. This latter process of self-deception, in which the individual conceals the real foundation of his thought by a series of ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... to believe in all manner of "cures," and as all doctors love to believe in the power of their remedies and as nothing is more open to self-deception than medical experience, the whole matter of therapeutics has always been made a great deal more of than the case would justify. It has been an inflated currency,—fifty pretences on paper, to one ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... those who wish to read unto you addresses of loyal welcome, it is not well to flout them publicly by showing signs of sleep; since it is the fashion of municipalities and Mayors to hold themselves to be of high importance, and a wise flattery of this self-deception well becomes you. And in replying, let your speech be both short and homely. The present German Emperor came lately among this people, and, having spoken aloud of the kindness of his Grandmamma, at once the hearts of all of them that are or hope to be grandmammas, or ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... not beautiful, or even pretty. Probably in her own estimate of herself she exaggerated her plainness. She was one of those persons who have not the gift of self-deception. Neither was she elegant in person. And yet there was something about her bearing, which would have prevented any one from imagining that she was other than a high-born lady. There was strong evidence of intellect in her face; and it was doubtless from within that came that quiet ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... gives advice that ain't asked," declared Mrs. Sykes with sincere self-deception. "But what sensible folks see in Mary Coombe I can't imagine. I may be biased, not having ever liked her from the very first, but being always willing to give her a chance—which I may say she never took. There's a verse in the Bible she reminds me of, 'Unstable ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... unworthy of him, that her intelligence was weak, that as she grew older and so better able to understand serious affairs, such as the importance of having an honest man at Albany as Lieutenant-Governor, they would become more in sympathy. And now, at a stroke, the whole fabric of self-deception fell from her. It was not that she saw Peabody so differently, but that she saw herself and her own heart, and where it lay. And she knew that "Billy" Winthrop, gentle, joking, selfish only in his love for her, held it in ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... the complex of all that we love. We often think we love traits of Character that we cannot possess; but we deceive ourselves. All that we truly love we strive to attain, and all that we strive after rightly we do attain. The cause of self-deception on this point is, that we think we love a certain trait of Character when we only love its reward; or that we hate other traits when we ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... visits to the picture-galleries of Europe, I am filled with compassion for the multitudes of my country-folk who yearly undergo the same misery. I hope they do not all know how miserable they are, and fancy that they enjoy themselves; but with many the suffering is too great for self-deception, and they come home to look back upon those long halls, filled with the masterpieces of ancient and modern art, as mere torture-chambers, whence nothing is brought away but backache, headache, weary feet and an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... of pose is not when it makes a man try to be or to appear at his best: but when a man lives a thoroughly unreal life, taking a high line in theory and never troubling about practice, then it's incredible to what lengths self-deception can go. Dr. Johnson said that he looked upon himself as a polite man! It is quite easy to get to believe yourself impeccable in certain points: and as one gets older, and less assailable, and less liable to be pulled up and told the hard truth, it is astonishing how serenely you can sail along. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Perfect self-deception can be a rare, almost a precious thing, ranking with all absurd, delightful faiths from the child's sweet certainty of fairydom to the enthusiast's belief in the potency of ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... suggestive article in Euphorion,[90] entitled "Wahrheit und Lge auf dem Theater und in der Literatur," expressed the opinion that Sterne was instrumental in sharpening powers of observation with reference to self-deception in little things, to all the deceiving impulses of the human soul. It is held that through Sterne's inspiration Wieland and Goethe were rendered zealous to combat false ideals and life-lies in greater things. It is maintained that Tieck also was schooled in Sterne, and, ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... sentence, it has come to us as a true messenger of the God who has no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. We need the voice of these threatenings, because the heart has such a great power of self-deception in it. Men find it so easy to thrust away into the dim background of their thoughts all the dark but sure consequences of present sins, treating them as a debt which will come up no doubt for payment some day, but may be ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... to Zephyr's carrying out his scheme of having his mysterious disappearance reported, he was fully satisfied that it would not deceive Pierre for an instant. Firmstone, however, was deceived in another way. It was a case of harmless self-deception, the factors of which were wholly beyond his control. His reason assured him unmistakably that Hartwell would start at once for Colorado on learning of the loss of the bullion, and that the manager would be a hindrance ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... backs of their heads, and for the back of your own mind no mirror has been invented. They swathe him about so thickly that the pricks of fate scarce penetrate to him, or become but a pleasant titillation. And so, indeed, it is with all of us who go on living. Self-deception is the anaesthetic of life, while God is ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... subdued, and even effaced, the trivial faults of that early age, exercised on my character an influence far from beneficial to my future happiness. One of the subjects on which Mrs. Middleton would often speak to me with eagerness and eloquence, was the self-deception with which most people persuade themselves that their affections flow in their most natural channels, without proving their own feelings by the stern test of reality. Fully aware of her partiality to me; aware, too, how unattractive a child my cousin Julia was, and how ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... she said, smiling mournfully, "forgive me, I don't believe you: you are not going away, but I will ask you one more favour. Call this"—she pointed to her papers—"self-deception, feminine logic, a mistake, as you like; but do not hinder me. It's all that is left me in life." She turned away and paused. "Before this I had nothing. I have wasted my youth in fighting with you. Now I have caught at this and am living; I am happy.... It seems to me that I have found in ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... thankful that Helen Minorkey had those higher qualities which would up-lift—he had read some German, and compounded his words—up-lift a man to a higher level. Perhaps every loyal-hearted lover plays these little tricks of self-deception on himself. Every lover except the one whose "object" is indeed perfect. You know who that is. So do I. Indeed, life would be a very poor affair if it were not for these—what shall I call them? If Brown knew how much Jones's wife was superior to his own, Brown would be neither ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to have acquiesced at all. It is to have identified oneself with an imagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when no ecstasy remains, one rebels. It is a megalomania, a sublime self-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side of destiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers which have ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... said. She was standing at the open window, in the stillness that tells of intense mental engrossment. Self-deception was impossible for her; her mind was too acute for tolerance of subterfuge; and for her, also, away and beyond the merciless findings of intellect was the besetment of presentiment, intuition, inward convictions that ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... fetters Of thine arms, so wont to twine around me, And the hand, the ravishing companion Of thy sweet caresses, lies unmoving. Were my thoughts of thee but based on error, Were the love I bear thee self-deception, I must now have found it out, since Amor Is, without his bandage, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... her. He had never conceived it possible, in his ignorance of women, that a woman should really love him. She, whom he had first loved so hopelessly, had given him all she had to give, which was herself, frankly and freely. And after she had come to him, she loved him for a time, beyond even self-deception. But when she no longer loved him, she hid her secret and kept it long and well; for she feared him. He was not like Reanda. He would not strike only; he would kill and ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... adventurers who captured the pueblo of Mexico saw a king in Montezuma, lords in Aztec chiefs, and a palace in the large joint-tenement house occupied, Indian fashion, by Montezuma and his fellow-householders. It was, perhaps, an unavoidable self-deception at the time, because they knew nothing of the Aztec social system. Unfortunately it inaugurated American aboriginal history upon a misconception of Indian life which has remained substantially unquestioned until recently. ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... and her smart gown might have been taken to show either the potentialities of a settled income, or a politic concession to the taste of her hearers. As I listened I reproached myself for ever having suspected her of self-deception in saying that she took no pleasure in her work. I was sure now that she did it only for Lancelot, and judging from the size of her audience and the price of the tickets I concluded that Lancelot must be receiving a ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... expenses, with a large part of the community, exceed gains. Certainly, this is true at all times with a certain portion of society, but probably at no time with a large portion. There is a tendency to great self-deception in all such speculations; and no one ever thinks of bringing them to the only true test—statistical facts. The reader ought, therefore, to pay little attention to the complaints in the text, as to an increased extravagance ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... disappointment haunted her onward steps, and memory darkened to regret. Poor Theresa! there was many a pang in her experience then proudly hidden from all human gaze; and her suffering was not the less because she felt that it arose in part from self-deception, and from its very character was beyond the solace ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... doing it?—why, my Gabriel? Was she a thief? Was she really a man in disguise? Was she some malicious old hag who had seen that I was afraid of her? Was she a spectre conjured up by my very cowardice? Was she a mocking phantasm of human self-deception? ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... him! Yet it was likely that Haldin had said very little. The fellow's casual utterances were caught up and treasured and pondered over by all these imbeciles. And was not all secret revolutionary action based upon folly, self-deception, and lies? ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... enters into the movement toward the end. Leave out the direction which depends upon foresight of possible future results, and there is no intelligence in present behavior. Let there be imaginative forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its attainment depends, and there is self-deception ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... moment. Thomson was an inspired poet, but he could not work miracles; in cases where the art of seeing had in some degree been learned, the teacher would further the proficiency of his pupils, but he could do little more; though so far does vanity assist men in acts of self-deception, that many would often fancy they recognised a likeness when they knew nothing of the original. Having shown that much of what his biographer deemed genuine admiration must in fact have been blind wonderment—how is the rest to be accounted for?—Thomson was fortunate ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... bitter fruits of hatred ... for his wife, drifting to a pallid fate made up of petty adjustments and compromises. Yes ... he found himself pitying Helen Starratt most of all. Because he had a feeling that she would go on to the end cloaking her primitive impulses in a curious covering of self-deception. She would never understand ... never! She would always be restless, straining at the conventions, but unable or unwilling to pay the price of full freedom. And her remaining days would be spent in a futile pulling at the chains which her own cowardice had forged. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception." ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... been sincere in saying he did not intend any of his plays to be represented. We are more inclined to accuse him of self-deception when he asserts that he did not mean them to be popular; but he took sure means to prevent them from being so. Marino Faliero, in particular, was pronounced by Dr. John Watkins—old Grobius himself—"to be the dullest of dull plays;" and even the warmest admirers of the poet had to ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... importance that the young should inquire faithfully into the nature of the habits they are forming. They should not fall into self-deception—a common error, on this subject. The love of indulgence should not be permitted to blind them to the legitimate consequences of careless habits. Let them look abroad on their fellow-beings, and critically study the tendencies and fruits of their habits. When they see one ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... sincerity of a confession, which does not try to tell lies to God, and, attempting to deceive Him, really deceives only the self-righteous sinner. Whosoever opens his heart to God, makes a clean breast of it, and without equivocation or self-deception or the palliations which self-love teaches, says, 'I have played the fool and erred exceedingly,' to that man the Psalmist thinks pardon ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... saints" prepared for pious readers, and its absence has accustomed us to dissever humour from sanctity. But a candid soul is, as a rule, a humorous soul, awake to the tragi-comic aspect of life, and immaculately free from self-deception. And to such souls, cast like Teresa's in heroic mould, comes the perception of great moral truths, together with the sturdy strength which supports enthusiasm in the face of human disabilities. They are the lantern-bearers of every age, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... pride and egoism; his ready tact, social charm, and power of psychological analysis, subtle sophistry and self-deception; his warmest affection, disguised self-love; his finest qualities perverted lead ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... against hypocrisy, a vice unsightly rather than desperately wicked. And in the excitement about it its dangerous, even deadly near kinsman, self-deception, escapes unassailed. Seven cardinal sins; but what of the eighth?—the parent of all the others, the one beside which ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... although their insatiable hatred may have made them suggest clubbing as the mode by which His death should be hastened, we need not question that their scruples were genuine. It is an extraordinary instance of the game of self-deception which the human conscience can play. Here were people fresh from the greatest crime ever committed—their hands still reeking, one might say, with the blood of the Innocent—and their consciences, ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... whole scene was especially grievous to Alick, even more than to either of the others, for as her perception failed her, association carried her back to old arguments with him, and sometimes it was, "Alick, indeed you do like to attribute motives," sometimes, "Indeed it is not all self-deception," or the recurring wail, "Alick is right, only don't let him be so angry!" If he told her how far he was from anger, she would make him kiss her, or return to some playful rejoinder, more piteous to hear than all, or in the midst would come on the ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... poor Allen! here, perhaps, hallucination, or self-deception, is more apparent than in all the strange tales you confided to me. For here is the hallucination of the man seated on the shores of Nature, and who would say to its measureless sea, 'So far shalt thou go and no farther;' here is the hallucination of the creature, who, not content with ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to err in fancying themselves righteous, than the reverse; nevertheless, the course and limits of self-deception are indefinite. It is within possibility for a man to believe himself wicked, while his actual conduct is ridiculously blameless, even praiseworthy! Although intending to mislead Balder, Manetho's utterances were ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... almost fascinating in her frankness. She tore aside ruthlessly the curtain of self-deception, revealing her motives, as if she challenged him to call them less worthy than ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... Self-deception is a very easy thing in matters of this sort; it is seldom difficult to find arguments in favour of that which the heart is set upon. The one that knows the Lord, will pray until the other is brought to him; neither will be guilty of casting the slightest ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... as Mr Wentworth mightn't like to be the one as married me," said Rosa, with a momentary gleam of vanity through her tears. The little simper with which the girl spoke, the coquettish looks askance at the Perpetual Curate, who stood grave and unmoved at a distance, the movement of unconscious self-deception and girlish vanity which for a moment distracted Rosa, had a great effect upon the spectators. The judges looked at each other across the table, and Dr Marjoribanks made a commentary of meditative nods upon that little exhibition. "Just so," said the Doctor; "maybe ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... Rachel decided. This was no pose, but a horrible piece of self-deception. This raddled, repulsive creature had actually persuaded herself into the delusion that she still had the appearance of a young girl. Heaven help her if that delusion ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... examination and experience. Instead of taking one's own unsupported conjectures or the opinions of others as a guide, the secret of the search for truth is to become independent and of age, to think for one's self; and the only remedy against the dangers of self-deception and the ease of repetition is to be found in doubting everything hitherto considered true. This is the meaning of the Cartesian doubt, which is more comprehensive and more thorough than the Baconian. Descartes disputed only ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... quality: with all her faults she was true. She lived out her life frankly, boldly, without self-deception or imposition. So in the entertaining volumes of her letters and pen-portraits of acquaintances, she has left a valuable record. She takes us back a century, and shows not only how people looked and what they did, but ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... of self-deception which we have frequently observed is due to the fact that people feel flattered by the idea that Providence has taken a special interest in their case and cured them by miraculous intervention. It is so much more interesting to be cured by some occult principle ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... Yet, so great and so strong was the preconceived opinion of the people in his favour, that only the irresistible proofs furnished by the man's own actions could gradually shake this opinion. It required the full force and obstinacy of this strange self-deception in Wellington, it required the full measure of his activity and iron persistency, in order at last, by a perpetual reiteration of errors and mistakes, to create in the people the firm conviction that the Duke of Wellington was one of the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the Crimean war, I may give a curious example of the power of self-deception in the most upright men. The offices of colonial secretary and war minister were, in conformity with usage, united in the hands of the Duke of Newcastle. On the outbreak of war it became necessary to separate them. It evidently lay with the holder to ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... shame of his nakedness with these rags of devil-may-care good spirits. The genial cynicism of Ogniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies is at heart the satirist of moral illusions, the unmasker of self-deception, who with long experience of human infirmities, has come to chuckle gently over his own skill in dealing with them; and has he not—we may ask—wound around his own spirit some of the incurable illusions of worldly wisdom? ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... profound knowledge of human nature in all its forms, not excepting the clerical, professional, and theological sort,—especially when in the fighting mood,—enabled him to measure accurately the personal equation in every problem, even when masked to the point of self-deception. His judicial balance and his power to see the real point in a controversy made him an admirable guide, philosopher, and friend. His vital rather than traditional view and use of the truth, and his sunny calm and poise, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... she was drifting, and from the breach that must follow with her brother. But above all else that caused her pain was the shocking suspicion that her love for Hubert perhaps was influencing her, and that she was living in gross self-deception as to the sincerity ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... the 'Nocturnes' and some of the 'Arrangements,' are defended only by a generous self-deception, when it is urged for them that they will be famous to-morrow because they are ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... the one side no further evidence seems possible than the profound faith of the man himself, his recognised mental ability, and the belief of his followers. And against this it must be urged that the most complete honesty is no guarantee against self-deception, while ability and even genius are not at all incompatible with a pathologic strain. And in addition it must be borne in mind that these hallucinations are, after all, part of a very large class. Men of very little ability and influence experience substantially the same visions; they ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... a study when she heard of it. Rose had been guilty of a little wilful self-deception, still she received ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... Buddha is able by his perfect knowledge to save others. Of Buddhas, however, there are not many. One becomes an Arahat by a life of strenuous and untiring discipline. Ten fetters are to be broken by which a man is kept from freedom; self-deception is one of them, trust in sacrifice another, and the list embraces both sensual and intellectual weaknesses. One must watch and be sober; every act, however trivial, is to be done with full self-consciousness and earnestness. One must remember that ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... have long been wondering at my own wisdom; I cannot trust myself. And I think that I ought to stop and ask myself What am I saying? for there is nothing worse than self-deception—when the deceiver is always at home and always with you—it is quite terrible, and therefore I ought often to retrace my steps and endeavour to 'look fore and aft,' in the words of the aforesaid Homer. And now let me see; where are we? Have we not ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... anticipated, and whose judgments she had always hitherto despised. This was an easy task. She was yet to find that it was not the only task. Her thoughts are those of many, in like situations, and it is for this reason that we dwell upon them. Our purpose is, to show the usual processes of self-deception. ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... same punishment. That which they considered as already [Pg 205] absolutely past, the prophet, by a single word, brings again into the present, and the immediate future. By a single word of dreadful sound he terrified and aroused them out of their self-deception (which will not recognise its own sin in the picture of the sins of others), and out of their carnal security. Entirely analogous are 2 Kings ix. 31, where Jezebel says to Jehu, "Hast thou peace, Zimri, murderer of his master?" which Schmid well explains ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... rays in a vase of polished crystal! To Niphrata, Sah-luma remained as a sort of splendid divinity, for whom no devotion was too vast, too high, or too complete, . . better, oh surely far better that she should die in her beautiful self-deception, than live to see her elected idol descend to his true level, and openly display all the weaknesses of his volatile, flippant, godless, sensual, yet, alas! most fascinating and genius-gifted nature, . . a nature, which, overflowing as it was with potentialities of noble deeds, yet lacked ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... to her chair again and seated herself to watch it almost awed, it did not fade—the smile. It settled into a still radiance and stayed. And, fearful of the self-deception of longing as she was, Dowie could have sworn as the minutes passed that the mist of colour had been real and remained also and even made the whiteness a less deathly thing. And there was such a naturalness in the strange smiling that it radiated actual peace and rest and safety. When the clock ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... movement of a moving table and yet keep your superimposed hands perfectly passive; and with ninety-nine persons out of a hundred the startled interest in the movement even begets an unconscious desire to help it, which at times almost rises to a curious semi-conscious self-deception, a voluntary exaggeration of the marvellous. Yet nothing makes the ordinary sitter angrier than to be told he has helped to move the table. It is as though he were accused of cheating at whist, or worse, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... it believed that this was a late and feeble resolve of Henry, formed on his death-bed, when he was acting the part of a self-deceiver, forgetful of the lamentable effects of his ambition, and seeking comfort from his self-deception in the last moments of his life. There is strong and clear evidence that he not only had contemplated such a measure, but had actually taken important preliminary steps to facilitate the execution of his design, whenever he might be happily released from his present engagements. "This vindicatory ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... happiness, there was nothing on the side of prudence to stop him or make his progress slow; no doubts of her deserving, no fears of opposition of taste, no need of drawing new hopes of happiness from dissimilarity of temper. Her mind, disposition, opinions, and habits wanted no half-concealment, no self-deception on the present, no reliance on future improvement. Even in the midst of his late infatuation, he had acknowledged Fanny's mental superiority. What must be his sense of it now, therefore? She was of course only too good ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... training for surgical work, all came in connection with this great medical school. Such practical progress in medical education could not have been made but by men who faced the problems of the practice of medicine without self-deception and solved them as far as possible by common-sense, natural, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... a whole Nation fall into that? In such case, I answer, infallibly they will return out of it! For life is no cunningly-devised deception or self-deception: it is a great truth that thou art alive, that thou hast desires, necessities; neither can these subsist and satisfy themselves on delusions, but on fact. To fact, depend on it, we shall come back: to such fact, blessed or cursed, as we have wisdom for. The lowest, least blessed fact one knows ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... questionable liberty, and this cold-pulsed Heloise would fly forever. She must be left to her day dreams and to the work of a sweet self-deception," he artfully mused. They were interrupted but a moment, when Ram Lal Singh glided to the door of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... thought that now they are in a state of fearful peril; who say they can do nothing till His time comes, while still they acknowledge themselves to be far from Him; even this I believe to be a fact, strange and gross as the self-deception may appear to be. And others, too, many more, doubtless, are there who, not thinking themselves far from Him, but, on the contrary, high in His favour, still, by a dreadful deceit of Satan, are led to be indolent and languid ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... boors See deeper than we think, and hide within Those leathern hulls unfathomable truths, Which we amid thought's glittering mazes lose. They grind among the iron facts of life, And have no time for self-deception. ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... Turkish statesmen from the consequences of their own folly. In this cause no effort has been spared, even to the shedding of the best blood of England. All has been in vain. History does not relate a more striking instance of the truth of the old Latin saying that self-deception is the first step on the road to ruin. Advice tendered in the best interests of the Ottoman Empire has been persistently rejected. The Turks, who have always been strangers in Europe, have shown conspicuous inability to comply with the elementary requirements ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring |
