Blaise Pascal Quotes

Belief in the absence of illusions is itself an illusion.

Nothing is easier than self-deceit, since what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

Reason deceives us more often than does nature.

It is easier to deceive yourself, and to do so unperceived, than to deceive another.

When we believe in lies, we cannot see the truth, so we make thousands of assumptions and we take them as truth. One of the biggest assumptions we make is that the lies we believe are the truth!

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

Seeing is not always believing.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

Perception is created and twisted so quickly.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

It may not be impossible, but that our Faculties may be so construed, as always to deceive us in the things we judge most certain and assured.

It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.

We're able to use certain techniques to get people to behave in certain ways. We're able to use certain techniques to make it look like we're reading minds, even though we're not.

Perception's not reality.

In my business, my job is to make people believe they are seeing something they're not seeing.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

Perception is not always reality.

The senses do not deceive us, but the judgment does.