“It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us.”
Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice
Source: Pride and Prejudice
“If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.”
Twitter tweet (31 May 2009) http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1986617191<!-- also (1 June 2009) http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1986630272 --> <br class="br">Context: The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive." by William Gibson?
William Gibson117
American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder … 1948Related quotes
Michael Faraday (1791–1867) English scientist
Royal Institution Lecture On Mental Education (6 May 1854), as reprinted in Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, by Michael Faraday, 1859, pp 474-475, emphasis verbatim.
Context: Among those points of self-education which take up the form of mental discipline, there is one of great importance, and, moreover, difficult to deal with, because it involves an internal conflict, and equally touches our vanity and our ease. It consists in the tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires. It is impossible for any one who has not been constrained, by the course of his occupation and thoughts, to a habit of continual self-correction, to be aware of the amount of error in relation to judgment arising from this tendency. The force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error. In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense.
George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention
Article 9
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)
“The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.”
Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil
Source: Beyond Good and Evil
“Reality is a creation of our excesses.”
Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay
A Short History of Decay (1949)
“Our eternity is not real; it resembles us; it is our own invention; its scent is vanity.”
Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman
“Eternity and Eternity,” p. 32
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “Skywalking”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
Discourses on the Condition of the Great
Context: All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.
