There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our friends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please — that is as they please or displease us.

When we set up judgments for others, they become rules that we have to play by, too. By judging others for what we don’t have or because we envy them, we sabotage our own lives far more than we ever really hurt anybody else.

There is nothing which deceives us as much as our own judgement.

we all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.

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?

We conceive of ourselves falsely, we see ourselves as we are not; we live in a false relation with our environment, because we know neither the universe nor ourselves for what they really are...

The Synthesis Of Yoga, Chapter VI, The Synthesis of the Disciplines of Knowledge, p.320

Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

We deceive ourselves a good deal about love. It is almost never what they say it is.

And while there are countless ways that we rip ourselves off, there’s one way in particular that is, without a doubt, the most rampant and the most devastating of all: we invest everything we’ve got in believing that we’re not good enough.

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives — about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.