Quotes About Fooling Ourselves

“Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.”

— Barry López

“I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.”

— Iain Banks

“We like to look for patterns and find connections in unrelated events. This way we can explain them to ourselves. Life seems neater, or at least less messy. We need to feel we are in control: it is integral to our self-esteem. We also know, though we deny it, that we are not in control. So we settle for the illusions of control. What if we stopped fooling ourselves?”

— Jessica Zafra

“It wasn't that the dark side was stronger, but that everything was the dark side. All magic was inherently wrong, and it was only us fooling ourselves that some of it was good, some of it was bad. Magic ... just was.”

— Kim Harrison

“As we begin to leave Afghanistan, are we fooling ourselves about what we are leaving behind or what we have promised the people of Afghanistan? Especially the women and girls?”

— Greta Van Susteren

“I suppose about the only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.”

— Booth Tarkington

“There can be no fooling ourselves into thinking this is something other than what it is-the willful ejection of Molly from our nest. It's too late for second thoughts, anyway. She has to be moved into her dorm in time for freshman orientation. It's been marked on the kitchen calendar for weeks-the expiration date on her childhood.”

— Susan Wiggs

“One thing is sure: if we don't teach our young people how to deal with sex when they are half out of their minds, we are not only fooling them; we're fooling ourselves as well. Whatever lessons we teach them, we need to help them understand that they will react differently when they are calm and cool from when their hormones are raging at fever pitch (and of course the same also applies to our own behavior).”

— Dan Ariely

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

— Richard Feynman

“I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient.”

— James Surowiecki

“I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that regulators are going to be able to outsmart the bankers. So, the task of designing regulatory reform is trying to make more or less foolproof regulation and that's one of the advantages of the systemic category.”

— Robert F. Engle

“When we think we have something to say we are usually wrong. We are fooling ourselves. Trip into discovery. Don't write what you know, discover something new.”

— Marie Howe

“It is almost intrinsically impossible for ideas about how we are fooling ourselves to gain an adequate hearing. We are good enough at it to keep them nicely at bay.”

— Melvin Konner

“If Jesus Christ isn't the central figure in our lives and in our churches, we're only fooling ourselves.”

— Aiden Wilson Tozer