“Truth lives on in the midst of deception.”

I am my own heaven and hell!

The world’s history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple, like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results.

The first great law is to obey.

In love, Jealousy is the great exaggerator.

Alas! When duty grows thy law, enjoyment fades away.

Love is the reward of love.

Weep, for the light is dead.

Will it, and set to work briskly.

Fear of death is worse than dying.

If you would attain to your highest, go look upon a flower;what the flower does willessly, that do willingly.

Modest humility is beauty’s crown.

What’s old collapses, times change, And new life blossoms in the ruins.

It is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.

From the moment fear begins I have ceased to fear.

There are occasions when the general belief of the people, even though it be groundless, works its effect as sure as truth itself.

Stubbornness is not firmness.

Compromise is the welcome mat to deception.

For as long as I care to remember, religion, like the striptease, has always been a display of the power of suggestion. Like the Virgin Birth, it has all too often supported an immaculate deception.

Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.

Ruthven surmised that he had hit upon some of the central deceptions which had wrecked him and reduced him and so many of his colleagues to this condition.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.