1. “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” –
2. “It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.” – Anatole France
3. “Anything is better than lies and deceit!” –
4. “A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.” – Marina Tsvetaeva
5. “Deceit comes in through the ears, but usually leaves through the eyes.” – Baltasar Gracian
6. “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” –
7. “All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice and falsehood passing from words into things.” – Robert Southey
8. “An offended heart is the breeding ground of deception.” – John Bevere
9. “Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul.” – Patricia Briggs
10. “It is vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.” –
11. “If you are often deceived by those around you, you may be sure that you deserve to be deceived, and that instead of railing at the general falseness of mankind, you have first to pronounce judgment on your own jealous tyranny, or on your own weak credulity.” – Arthur Helps
12. “Just because something isn’t a lie does not mean that it isn’t deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.” – Criss Jami
13. “Life is the art of being well deceived, and in order that the deception may succeed, it must be habitual and uninterrupted.” – William Hazlitt
14. “Avoidance of self-deception is a matter of integrity, not comfort.” – Orrin Woodward
15. “Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.” –
16. “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable. When using our forces, we must appear inactive. When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away. When far away, we must make him believe we are near.” –
17. “Deception is everywhere.” – James Sanborn
18. “When you start to realize how much of what you’ve constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realization.” –
19. “Deceivers are the most dangerous members of society. They trifle with the best affections of our nature and violate the most sacred obligations.” – George Crabbe
20. “No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.” – Baron Greville
21. “Deceit is the false road to happiness, and all the joys we travel through to vice, like fairy banquets, vanish when we touch them.” – Aaron Hill
22. “Don’t tell me of deception. A lie is a lie, whether it be a lie to the eye or a lie to the ear.” – Samuel Johnson
23. “Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.” –
24. “In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the alternative options of deception, threat, and bribery have all been exhausted.” – Michael Musto
25. “We learn to deceive ourselves while we are trying to deceive others.” – Sidney Jourard
26. “A life of deceit is one of unmitigated torture, a living hell, which should deserve our pity for the unhappy beings who submit to it.” – Charles William Day
27. “Nothing is more common on earth than to deceive and be deceived.” – Johann Gottfried Seume
28. “The phrase ‘the world wants to be deceived,’ has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle. If it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification, they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them.” – Theodor W. Adorno
29. “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” – Sun Tzu
30. “I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity. Truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without, strangely enough, any wounds being inflicted of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.” – Osamu Dazai
31. “Self-deception helps us deceive.” – David Livingstone
32. “The easiest thing of all is to deceive one’s self. For what a man wishes, he generally believes to be true.” – Demosthenes
33. “When we successfully deceive others, they are not aware of it. The same is true with self-deception.” – Mardy Grothe
34. “Self-deception is nature. Hypocrisy is art.” – Mason Cooley
35. “Self-deception can be more comforting than self-knowledge. We like to fool ourselves.” – Russ Roberts
36. “You are never so easily fooled as when trying to fool someone else.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
37. “The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.” – Plato
38. “We often shed tears that deceive ourselves after deceiving others.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
39. “If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.” – William Somerset Maugham
40. “Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception.” – Soren Kierkegaard
41. “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
42. “The easiest person to deceive is oneself.” – Edward Bulwer-Lytton
43. “We lie best when we lie to ourselves.” – Stephen King
44. “Cheating in school is a form of self-deception. We go to school to learn. We cheat ourselves when we coast on the efforts and scholarship of someone else.” – James E. Faust
45. “Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.” – Moss Hart
46. “Reality is easy. It’s deception that’s the hard work.” – Lauryn Hill
47. “Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” –
48. “Deception may give us what we want for the present, but it will always take it away in the end.” – Rachel Hawthorne
49. “People trust their eyes above all else, but most people see what they wish to see, or what they believe they should see. Not what is really there.” – Zoë Marriott
50. “Not all lies are harmful. Sometimes, we’re willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, ‘Nice song.’ ‘Honey, you don’t look fat in that, no.'” – Pamela Meyer
51. “The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.” – John Ruskin
52. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” – Walter Scott
53. “A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love, he can’t help looking like a sheep.” –
54. “As someone who specializes in deception, I’ll tell you this much, when someone insistently implores, ‘Believe me,’ don’t. Pleading ‘believe me’ or ‘trust me,’ insisting to people that you are telling the truth, is a tell-tale sign that you probably aren’t.” – Pamela Meyer
55. “Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception, and ignorance, but it isn’t, it’s human.” – Desiderius Erasmus
56. “There’s a degree of deception in silence.” – Don Lemon
57. “The art of pleasing is the art of deception.” – Luc de Clapiers
58. “Lying is one of the quickest ways to ruin a beautiful relationship.” – Anonymous
59. “It is more shameful to distrust your friends than it is to be deceived by them.” – François de La Rochefoucauld
60. “I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.” – Samuel Johnson
61. “When a person cannot deceive himself, the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.” –
62. “It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies and is unvaccinated by suspicion.” – John Updike
63. “Even what appears to be the purest feeling could still be a deception.” – Soren Kierkegaard
64. “Nature never deceives us. It is we who deceive ourselves.” – John Bartlett
65. “He who tries to protect himself from deception is often cheated, even when most on his guard.” – Plautus
66. “We are never so easily deceived as when we imagine we are deceiving others.” – Francois de La Rochefoucauld
67. “We like to be deceived.” – Blaise Pascal
68. “Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.” – William Hazlitt
69. “It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the ‘fronts’ people assume before one another’s eyes, and the ‘front’ a writer puts on the face of reality.” – Francoise Sagan
70. “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.” –
71. “Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception.” – Edward Verrall Lucas
72. “While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.” – Sissela Bok
73. “Knowledge of God’s word is a bulwark against deception, temptation, accusation, even persecution.” – Edwin Louis Cole
74. “All confrontation is based on deception.” – Paul Watson
75. “It’s the great deception in modern culture, bad things call for noble names to cloak their evil outcomes.” – Greg Gutfeld
76. “The reason we bitterly hate those who deceive us is that they think they are cleverer than we are.” – François de La Rochefoucauld
77. “Deception is the knowledge of kings.” – Cardinal Richelieu
78. “The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.” – Oscar Wilde
79. “It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” – Noel Coward
80. “People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.” – Charles Dudley Warner
81. “Art is a deception that creates real emotions, a lie that creates a truth. And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.” – Marco Tempest
82. “Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.” – Homer
83. “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked, and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.” – Oscar Wilde
84. “Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it becomes a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.” – Claude Debussy
85. “Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that don’t have brains enough to be honest.” –
86. “People come to music to seek oblivion. Is that not also a form of deception?” – Claude Debussy
87. “Politicians are masters of the art of deception.” – Martin L. Gross
88. “Self-deceit is a most damaging trait.” – Scott Kahn
89. “I hate deception, even where the imagination only is concerned.” –
90. “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi
91. “He who has once used deception will deceive again.” – Roman Proverb
92. “Deceive boys with toys, but men with oaths.” – Lysander
93. “The art of using deceit and cunning grow continually weaker and less effective to the user.” – John Tillotson
94. “He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father will be the most daring in deceiving others.” – Horace
95. “To deceive a diplomat, speak the truth. He has no experience with it.” – Greek Proverb
96. “The people of the world having once been deceived, suspect deceit in truth itself.” – Hitopadesha
97. “Deception is a cruel act. It often has many players on different stages that corrode the soul.” – Donna A. Favors
98. “It is twice the pleasure to deceive the deceiver.” – Jean de La Fontaine
99. “There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.” – George Eliot
100. “Men still have to be governed by deception.” – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
101. “Yet, still we hug the dear deceit.” – Nathaniel Cotton
102. “Subtlety may deceive you. Integrity never will.” – Oliver Cromwell
103. “Good works and bad acts deceive both wise and simple.” – Portuguese Proverb
104. “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly, they are ravening wolves.” – St. Matthew
105. “Unlike grown-ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.” –
106. “For Satan’s deceptions to be successful, they must be so cunningly devised that his real purpose is concealed by wiles.” –
107. “In every age, it has been the tyrant, the oppressor, and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.” – Eugene Victor Debs
108. “No one can save you, there’s nothing to say. Deception’s the name of the game.” – Bon Jovi
109. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” – 1 John 1:8
