Pamela > Pamela's Quotes

“Humans see what they want to see.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth.”
― Jodi Picoult

“The trouble with giving yourself a pep talk is, that deep down you know it's all bullshit.”
― Sophie Kinsella, Remember Me?

“The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.”
― Voltaire

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.”
― Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts

“I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.”
― Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

[Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]”
― Robert Hughes

“Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“It's funny, in a human kind of way, how we can convince ourselves that we're in control at the very moment we are beginning to lose it.”
― William C. Moyers

“Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.”
― Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native

“Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.”
― Richard Feynman

“We all know dogmatists who are more concerned about holding their opinions than about investigating their truth. ... if they are mistaken, they will never discover it; they have condemned themselves to perpetual error. Human beings (including myself) sometimes use their beliefs for wish-fulfillment. Too often we believe what we want to be true.”
― David L. Wolfe, Epistemology: The Justification of Belief

“All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you are right. As one grows older, this is easier still.”
― Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Identity

“I live in my mind, such that whatever destroys me shall be a creature of my own invention.”
― Genevieve Ross

“Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.”
― Alain de Botton

“Of course, that rationalization didn't work at all. It would have helped if I'd had some Oreo cookie ice cream to eat at the same time. I've learned that self-delusion is much easier when there's something sweet in your mouth.”
― Lee Goldberg, Mr. Monk on the Couch

“The...act of surrender—or devotion, as the case may be—was, to him, a kind of lifeline for those who sought a quick answer and didn’t want to stick around long enough to see their doubt through to its ultimate conclusion. A conclusion, which, of itself, was a bittersweet paradox—for how could doubt simply cease to exist by any stretch of the imagination? Doubt was, nonetheless—from his own perspective—the only inclusive insight into the nature of a Truth exclusive of conditions.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.”
― Paul Hoffman, The Last Four Things

“Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments without difficulty.”
― T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

“A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, 'Good morning!'
And the three secretaries - each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style - recognise him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church; a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not real? They can be unsought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can ve made to be good. Very well then, it is good.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“I thought these grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”
― Aesop, Aesop’s Fables

“If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Deanna's job (as counselor) is to keep us from deluding ourselves.”
― Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode Guide Team, STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION EPISODE GUIDE: Details All 178 Episodes with Plot Summaries. Searchable. Companion to DVDs, Blu Ray and Box Set

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise