Best 9840 quotes in «lying quotes» category

If I had seen pictures of people eating each other on the wall, I would've told him I was into cannibalism.

If parents don’t want to hear the truth, children learn not to speak it.

If it is worth the pain. If it is worth the anguish. Then leave me lying in agony.

If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over so as to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. Highsmith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathise. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his self-ness', yet realised that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'daedal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.

If you have reason to suspect that a person is telling you a lie, look as though you believed every world he said. This will give him courage to go on; he will become vehement in his assertions, and in the end betray himself. Again, if you perceive that a person is trying to conceal something from you, but with only partial success, look at though you did not believe him, this opposition on you part will provoke him into leading out his reserve of truth and bringing the whole force of it to bear upon your incredulity.

If you’re lying to everyone you know, including yourself, at every possible turn, is a little upheaval really the worst that could happen to your life right now?

I know, brother, that you are a straightforward man, and that you pride yourself on it. But put one question to yourself: why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do it? And why do we consider telling the truth a virtue? Imagine that you meet a madman, who claims that he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him and show him that you don't have fins? Are you going to say to his face what you think? Well, tell me!' His brother was silent and Edward went on: 'If you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman and you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told a man the truth to his face, it would mean I was taking him seriously. And to take something so unimportant seriously means to become less than serious oneself. I, you see, must lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become one of them myself.

If you bend everything totally, blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal, and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you, and the world, better. It is this that you sacrifice if you do not tell the truth.

I lied," I said. ... "I know it," he said. "Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something." "I cant," he said. "There aint anything to do? Not anything?" "I didn't say that," Grandfather said. "I said I couldn't. You can." "What?" I said. "How can I forget it? Tell me how to." "You cant," he said. "Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable." "Then what can I do?" "Live with it," Grandfather said. "Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see that I cant?" "Yes you can," he said. "You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should.

I lie more convincingly than I tell the truth.

If you didn't like your own life, you changed it. You ran away. You did something spectacular. you didn't steal someone else's story and pretend it was yours.

I'll tell you something that was unusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma's response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that's not a common reaction.

I’m a liar, but an honest one. People reproach me for not always telling the same story in the same way. But this happens because I’ve invented the whole tale from the start and it seems boring to me and unkind to other people to repeat myself.

I love it when people lie! Lying is only man's privilege over all other organisms. Lying is what makes me a man.

I love her face when she smiles. But it could be that her smile is a lie that she uses to hide her clenched teeth. I don't understand why she cried. I can't even say, "You'll be all right." But I will always be by your side. After all, I am your cat.

In fact, lying to ourselves may be the most dangerous thing in the world because we live our truth whether we are honest about it or not.

In his opinion, all the world’s misfortunes stemmed from the countless untruths, both deliberate and unintentional, which people told because of haste or carelessness.

In short Donald Trump lies compulsively in large part because of who and what he is - a coward. This is why Mike Brzezinski said recently, "He brings nothing to the table.

Indeed, to this day, I think if you blame everything on the government, you're not just wrong, you're being reckless. It's as silly as blaming everything on the Freemasons, or the Illuminati, or insert-bad-guy-here. But I do believe that someone must ask the hard questions, especially of our elected officials as well as powerful men who become members of so-called secret societies. Remember: Governments don't lie. People lie. And if you want the real story, you need to find out more about those people.

In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being "psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life." When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. "While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge," she said. "You are your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying." A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three.

I think a lot of what we learn about others isn’t what they tell us. It’s what we observe. People can tell us anything they want.

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie.

I suppose we all lie to ourselves sometimes.

I swear to you, by my own stunning good looks and towering ego, that I am not lying to you.

I try not to take things lying down, especially rectal thermometers

isn't lying supposed to be a 'sin'? Or is it okay to lie when trying to make people you hate look bad?

It's difficult to hones with others when you continue lying to yourself.

It is patent that any group [believing itself to be] surrounded by a world of unbending and irreconcilable foes would see the abyss between itself and them as one that could be spanned by no tie or social obligation. Within such a group, the lie—as told to the "others"—would be neither an act merely tolerated nor a simple rule of social behavior; it would become obligatory and be transformed into a virtue.

It seems too simplistic that just repeating a persuasive message should increase its effect, but that’s exactly what psychological research finds (again and again). Repetition is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion. In fact it’s so obvious that we sometimes forget how powerful it is.

It's difficult to honest with others when you continue lying to yourself.

It was the last thing I ever said to her. A lie. The worst kind of lie --the kind shrouded in good intentions. The kind cowards use to justify their weakness.

It’s going to be okay, Eric," Urte said, helping me sit up. I shook my head. "Lying is my forte, Urte, not yours.” (Eric.)

I was only half-lying. No, not lying. Omitting the truth – half of it, anyway.

I was recently living more comfortably surrounded by secrets... Like dozens of luxurious satiny pillows, they were embracing me from all directions into safe lulling warmth, thus isolating me from the sharp dead-cold edges of the truth hiding behind their endearingly smooth textures and tender soothing colours. Secrets could be so irresistibly beautiful...

Love me for what I am Not what I try to be. Love me for what I am. I am A person who likes to lie too much. I try too much To impress other people... Often my inferiors.

Lies quit when they are tired; truth quits when it has won.

Maybe the problem with lying is that once you start faking it, it's impossible to tell where the make-believe you ends and the real you begins. It's hard to be who you are, but it's even harder to keep up the lie.

Men prefer sweet lies to unpleasant truths

More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.

Most of our waking life is make believe. If there was a way to record every dream that crosses our minds, the true nature of humans would be laid bare

My ability to make up lies on the spot chills me as much as it saves me.

My momma always said the best way to get what you want from people is to give them what they think they want. They expected me to be stupid, so I used that to our advantage.

I was beginning to agree with the thesis that some truths were better off dead. And buried.

Lying is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one's pleasure, or one's honour if the disclosure of one's pleasure runs counter to one's honour. One lies all one's life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem.

Lying is second nature to him... More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.

Lying is the most fun a woman can have without taking her clothes off.

Lying makes a lot of people a lot of money. Lying is big business.

Lying to the masses is a normal aspect of business for corrupt corporate controlled governments.

Lying in small doses makes a good storyteller great.