‘The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it?’ We have so many ways of not
knowing it, and such strong incentives not to want to. We want too many other things too much.
The world throbs with deception and self-deception, like the systole and diastole of the heart.
Nothing is dearer to us than our cheap self-deceits which we hope to pass off on the world for a high price. The mind is a finely-tuned instrument for playing itself false.
A self-believer is bound to be a self-deceiver. All faith comes at the cost of a great deal of deception, be it of oneself or of others.
All deception starts and ends in self-deception. ‘The most successful tempters and thus the most injurious,’ as Lichtenberg said, ‘are the deluded deluders.’ To fool others, you must first fool yourself, though at times you need merely seem to.
How little effort it costs most people to keep their eyes shut to the most glaring truths.
There’s no lie that we won’t tell ourselves to justify doing whatever we think we have to do to get whatever we think we want.
We could redeem most of our faults or misfortunes if we used them to learn what we are, though most rob us of the will to do so.
We don’t see others clearly, because they are too far from us, and we don’t see ourselves, because we are too close. We don’t make out what those close to us are like, because we care too little for them. And we don’t want to make out what we are like, since we care too much. We can’t get outside our own minds, but we have no will to go within them. The motives of others seem so tangled and inscrutable because we can’t gain access to them, and our own do so since we would gain nothing from their scrutiny.
We surround ourselves with mirrors, so that we won’t see what we are. They reflect back to us precisely what we’ve made up our minds we look like.
Most people are prepared to know themselves at their fringe, so that they won’t have to find out what they are at their core. They see the margin where their self meets the world which they plan to stamp their crass will on.
We want to learn how the world works because we want to control it. But we don’t want to know what we are since we might feel that we had to control ourselves.
The few who know their soul up close are still not conversant with large tracts of it which those who are scarcely acquainted with them see straight off, as you may figure out a husband or wife more unerringly when you’ve met them once than their mate does who has lived with them for years. ‘Most people,’ Lichtenberg says, ‘are known to others better than they are known to themselves.’
Some people mistake their self for the half-truths that they hold about themselves, and some for the half-truths that their admirers hold about them.
‘We are never deceived,’ says Goethe, ‘we deceive ourselves.’ How is it that we are such shallow beings, yet such deep enigmas to our own selves? The world, which knows nothing but
the outermost shows, may sound us more inwardly than we do. We shroud our motives in mystery, since most of them are so mean.
Most of us know no more of ourselves than our own self-deceptions. And that’s all we need to know to make our way in this world of fraud. To know more would do us no good, and might do us great harm.
How could we see how small we are, when we seem to cut such a large figure in our own small world?
I’m glad to hear anything of myself, so long as it’s not the truth. And I’m glad to hear the truth about everything else, and often I admit it to everyone but myself.
Some people who know their own depths are still deceived by the pasteboard masks which the world obliges them to wear.
I don’t learn who I am, since there is no one that could teach me. It is the one subject that I would have to get to know by my own introspection. ‘You are the problem,’ Kafka warns. ‘No scholar to be found far and wide.’
I predict my own moods and responses no more presciently than anyone else would, and I interpret them no more perceptively. And it’s from these slippery surmises that I form my sensations and feelings. And what course they take will be due in part to the misjudgments I make about what caused them.
Latch on to the right illusions, and you are well on your way to fulfilling your dreams.
You beat your way more directly to what you want if you’re not saddled with self-knowledge. But if you don’t know who you are, you will want what won’t satisfy you, and you will get what you don’t want. But you will be spared this knowledge too, and you will be left free to go on wanting.
Some of the most indomitable people, who would never flinch from a foe, hide from themselves their whole lives. They have to go out to face the world, since they lack the nerve to stay in and face the blank of their own self. They can stare down any threat but the truth.
We refuse to look in our own hearts in the hope that no one else will look in them, as babies shut their eyes and trust that they can’t be seen. And the world plays along with our game as we do with children.
I love myself too well to wish to know myself better. I can’t know myself in full, since some outcrop of ambition or vanity always blocks my sight. I try to dupe my rivals to gain a start on them, and I have to dupe myself so as to reap the benefit of it. Our illusions play a wide
repertoire of tunes, but all in the swelling key of our conceit. No matter what tincture they are dyed in, we weave them from the unbreakable threads of our self-belief.
Self-love makes a life of self-deception absolutely essential. If we knew what we were, we might not find it quite so easy to love ourselves as we do.
I flee self-awareness, because I fear that it might cost me success. And yet at times I would choose to go under rather than grasp who I am.
I’m too lazy to get to know my real self. But how doggedly I toil to burnish the brazen figurine of my sham one.