Marina and the Diamonds Quotes

If you want something to be true badly enough, you can rewrite it that way, in your head. You can even start to believe it.

It's very difficult to lie to yourself about certain things. I'm not necessarily convinced about how information is gathered and I don't think the credence that's given to it is valid.

To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants. The conspiracy between these two servants allows us to live at the fulcrum of stark reality and comforting illusion.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

One of the mistakes we'll make because we're human beings is to believe that your vision is a fact. That's the natural optimism of human beings.

…the majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.

Human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. We can justify any amount of sadness if it fits our own particular standard of reality.

I told myself it was the snow—she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.

Our everyday, traditional ideas of reality are delusions which we spend substantial parts of our daily lives shoring up, even at the considerable risk of trying to force facts to fit our definition of reality instead of vice versa.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

But what if...what if you sincerely believed something was true, but you were dead wrong? What if you were so stubbornly sure that you were right, that you wouldn’t even consider the truth? Would the truth be silenced, or would it try to break through?

This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.

I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.

Don't fall into the trap of believing so deeply in your own ideology that you cannot even see the flaws in it.

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

We are willing to believe anything other than the truth.

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

People like what is not true and they don't like what is true.

You are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before - whether or not it is actually true.

People who believe their unquestioned thoughts cannot see what is obvious and directly in front of their faces at all times, because they are invested in what they believe to be true. As long as they live out of an unquestioned mind, they must continue to argue with what they believe is happening rather than the reality of what is really happening.

False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.