Deceptive Quotes - Page 4

• That which leads us to the performance of duty by offering pleasure as its reward, is not virtue, but a deceptive copy and imitation of virtue.
  [Lat., Nam quae voluptate, quasi mercede aliqua, ad officium impellitur, ea non est virtus sed fallax imitatio simulatioque virtutis.]

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Offering, Rewards, Virtue

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• Fame is a by-product which you have to deal with in a sensible way. To believe that it is anything more significant than that is deeply self-deceptive.

  Jodhi May

  Believe, Self, Way

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• Love brings to light the lofty and hidden characteristics of the lover--what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it caneasily be deceptive with respect to what is normal in him.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Love, Light, Normal

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• A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

  P. D. James

  Prejudice, Letters, May

  P. D. James (2007). “Time to Be in Earnest”, p.85, Vintage

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• One, which I mention several times elsewhere, is the need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens. The other is the inherently deceptive nature of the stock market. Doing what everybody else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, is often the wrong thing to do at all.

  Philip Arthur Fisher

  Needs, Investing, Way

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• I'm worried about greenwashing. I think we should come down on it very, very hard, whether it's with criminal intent or actively deceptive.

  John Elkington

  Thinking, Criminals, Worried

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts - that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Philosophy, Men, Objectivity

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 141), 1964.

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• The deceptive, glossy media images of faces, bodies and social lifestyles, make us hate ourselves so we will buy a solution to love ourselves once again.

  Bryant H. McGill

  Hate, Media, Body

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• When the enemy's envoy's speak in humble terms, but continues his preparations, he will advance. When their language is deceptive but the enemy pretentiously advances, he will retreat. When the envoys speak in apologetic terms, he wishes a respite. When without a previous understanding the enemy asks for a truce, he is plotting. When the enemy sees an advantage but does not advance to seize it, he is fatigued.

  Sun Tzu

  Art, War, Humble

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• Mental activity in the daytime creates a latent form of habitual thought which again transforms itself at night into various delusory visions sensed by the semi-consciousness. This is called the deceptive and magic-like Bardo of Dream.

  Milarepa

  Dream, Yoga, Night

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• Imagination is the deceptive part in man, the mistress of error and falsehood.

  Blaise Pascal

  Truth, Lying, Men

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• This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

  David Levithan

  Character, Reality, Giving

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• It is unlikely that many people will take to heart the conclusion that coming into existence is always a harm. It is even less likely that many people will stop having children. By contrast, it is quite likely that my views either will be ignored or will be dismissed. As this response will account for a great deal of suffering between now and the demise of humanity, it cannot plausibly be thought of as philanthropic. That is not to say that it is motivated by any malice towards humans, but it does result from a self-deceptive indifference to the harm of coming into existence.

  David Benatar

  Children, Heart, Self

  David Benatar (2008). “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence”, p.225, Oxford University Press

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• You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers - you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.

  Anais Nin

  Clever, Thinking, Ideas

  "Henry and June". Book by Anais Nin, 1986.

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• Don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive — don’t mourn them uselessly. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving. Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say it was a dream, your ears deceived you: don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.

  C.P. Cavafy

  Goodbye, Dream, Long

  Constantine P. Cavafy, “The God Abandons Anthony”

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• It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

  Georges Bataille

  World, Form, Parody

  Georges Bataille (1985). “Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939”, p.5, U of Minnesota Press

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• It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

  George Eliot

  Average, Feelings, Depth

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.1222, ShandonPress

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• Death and loss, they plague you. So do memories. Like the Mississippi's incessant slap against the levees, they creep up with deceptive sweetness before grabbing your heart and pulling it under.

  Karen White

  Memories, Heart, Loss

  Karen White (2011). “The Beach Trees”, p.12, Penguin

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• Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things

  Gilles Deleuze

  Thinking, Vanity, Ease

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• But when we set out to understand somebody’s inside? Is that a trip that ever ends? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?

  Pascal Mercier

  Soul, Shadow, Stories

  Pascal Mercier (2008). “Night Train to Lisbon: A Novel”, p.294, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The word itself has another color. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green.

  William H. Gass

  Yellow, Color, Green

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• Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

  Gloria Naylor

  Hurt, Memories, Glasses

  Gloria Naylor (2005). “The Women of Brewster Place”, p.35, Penguin

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• Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Female, Have Faith, Language

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.300, Penguin

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• Look underfoot. You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Don't despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.

  John Burroughs

  Nature, Opportunity, Thinking

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• There's a deceptive sin that can keep us from walking in love: pride. It's deceptive because when you have pride, you're usually too proud to admit it. I know this because I used to have teachings on pride and they didn't sell well.

  Joyce Meyer

  Teaching, Pride, Proud

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