"What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self."
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Deception quotes
Deception
337 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Deception quotes (page 3 of 17)
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"Truth lives on in the midst of deception."
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"Tomorrow is an old deceiver, and his cheat never grows stale."
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"All warfare is based on deception. If your enemy is superior, evade him. If angry, irritate him. If equally matched, fight and if not: split and re-evaluate."
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"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties."
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"The sure way to be cheated is to think one's self more cunning than others."
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"The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion."
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"Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves."
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"Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth."
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"Deceit is the false road to happiness; and all the joys we travel through to vice, like fairy banquets, vanish when we touch them."
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"All martial art is simply an honest expression of one's body — with a lot of deception in between."
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"Politeness is deception in pretty packaging."
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"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."
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"We like to be deceived."
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"Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down."
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"Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth."
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"A resolution never to deceive exposes a man to be often deceived."
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"We are inconsolable at being deceived by our enemies and being betrayed by our friends, yet we are often content in be being treated like that by our own selves."
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"I am the scroll of the poet behind which samurai swords are being sharpened."
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"No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can, if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers, offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race."
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