Life is the art of being well-deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

False. Everything by which you have lived and live now is all a deception, a lie, concealing both life and death from you.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Do what you will, this life's a fiction, And it is made up of contradiction.

Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Mundus vult decipi' — the world wants to be deceived. To live without deception presupposes standards beyond the reach of most people whose existence is largely shaped by compromise, evasion and mutual accommodation. Could they face their weakness, their vanity and selfishness, without a mask?

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived.

The secret to life is to enjoy the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.

No one cares for reality, everyone stakes his essence on illusion. Slaves and dupes of their self-love, men live not in order to live but to make other believe they have lived!

Life had to invent death to evolve.

What do you want meaning for? Life is desire, not meaning.

Harris: Yes. In fact, self-deception might have paid evolutionary dividends in other ways. Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all — and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. Now, clearly many things may have been adaptive for our ancestors — such as tribal warfare, rape, xenophobia — that we now deem unethical and would never want to defend. But I’m wondering if you see any possibility that a social system that maximizes truth-telling could be one that fails to maximize the well-being of all participants. Is it possible that some measure of deception is good for us?

The world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears
but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony.

Life is so unlike theory.