We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

When I left Dortmund, I said it’s not important what people think when you come in but what they think when you leave.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

What really matters is how God sees me. He isn’t concerned with labels; he is concerned about the state of man’s soul.

Men are what their mothers made them.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.

Science is nothing but perception.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

It is better to be deceived by one’s friends than to deceive them.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

People wonder aloud about whether I am an okay mother. That is obviously painful because it’s so important to me. It’s hard to hear that people think I’m not a capable mother and a good person, that they just think I’m nuts.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

What people see on court is another side of me; it’s not me.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

The truth is, I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men sometimes fool themselves.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

I was mischievous. I wasn’t bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn’t know. I used to tell her some man gave me $10 to sweep out the yard. I was like Robin Hood. I took from the rich and gave to the poor. Me.

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.