“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.”

— George Orwell

"In Front of Your Nose" http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose, Tribune (22 March 1946)
Context: The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

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George Orwell 473

English author and journalist 1903–1950

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

“We tell our children things which we know are not so, but which we wish were so.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. … We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. … Which deception is more dangerous?”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Works of Love (1847), p. 5

“We are right when, and only when, we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

The Pursuit of God (1957)

“Occasionally we all do wrong things from right motives. Only time can prove us right or wrong. The past is the past. Nothing can change it now, and who is to say that it was all wrong, anyway?”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: The Devil's Web

“We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.”

Chuck Klosterman book Downtown Owl

Source: Downtown Owl

“We all not only have better intimations, but are capable of better things than we know.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXII : Grand Master Architect, p. 191
Context: We all not only have better intimations, but are capable of better things than we know. The pressure of some great emergency would develop in us powers, beyond the worldly bias of our spirits; and Heaven so deals with us, from time to time, as to call forth those better things. There is hardly a family so selfish in the world, but that, if one in it were doomed to die—one, to be selected by the others,—it would be utterly impossible for its members, parents and children, to choose out that victim; but that each would say, "I will die; but I cannot choose." And in how many, if that dire extremity had come, would not one and another step forth, freed from the vile meshes of ordinary selfishness, and say, like the Roman father and son, "Let the blow fall on me!" There are greater and better things in us all, than the world takes account of, or than we take note of; if we would but find them out.