Vernon Howard Quotes

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.

A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.

I'm very good at denial.

We create the illusions we need to go on.

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.

The neurotic's strongest fantasy is that he has no fantasies. The real is very real to him, the unreal even more so.

Illusion is sometimes all that keeps us sane." - Anita

Some people have a difficult time facing truth and reality. They prefer to live in a make-believe world, pretending that certain things aren't happening.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

The capacity for people to kid themselves is huge. Living on illusions or delusions, and the re-establishing of these illusions or delusions requires a big effort to keep them from being seen through. But a very old idea is at work behind our current state of affairs: enantiodromia, or the Greek notion of things turning into their opposite.

Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.

There is the natural tendency that all of us are vulnerable to, to deny unpleasant realities and to look for any excuse to push them away and resolve to think about them another day long in the future.

When all else fails there's always delusion.

I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.

In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

Denial of death at some point becomes a delusion.

We have a never sated appetite for self deception.

The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

Denial is a powerful force.

This is in us: a certain sense of denial, a certain sense of groupthink. This is not something that sits on one party line or the other. We've seen it in all permutations throughout history, and at the core of it is a certain insistence that what we want to be true is now true, and what we don't like is now false.

Victims don't want to know they're victims. I guess that's just victim psychology: if you don't know about it, it's not really happening.

Obviously I wasn't playing well at the time. But as a player, you lie to yourself. You say, "There's nothing wrong. I'm just not on time [at the plate]." You make something else up because pain is not an option.

The mere suggestion of fame and fortune casts a glamour all its own. It is rather alarming how quickly people will turn someone else's fiction into fact in order to support their own fictions of themselves.

I convinced myself I hadn't seen anything, ... I had done this many times before ... I was adept at erasing reality.