Tao Te Ching
Lies
We’re normally taught that lying is bad and that we should never lie. But what if someone’s life depends on us lying to protect them? What if not lying would create terrible suffering? Lying to others and to ourselves has obvious, short-term advantages. Evolutionary biologists even argue that the ability to delude ourselves increases our ability to delude others which makes us more successful in life. This success has produced more offspring which has increased and passed on this particular trait. The “success” of self-deception however has serious down sides and easily becomes a selling of our souls to the devils of materialism. It pads us in a cocoon of illusion that blinds to any kind of authentic, truly meaningful life. If—as Sun Tzu said—the art of war is deception, the art of peace must include honesty and transparent authenticity.
Because, as Shakespeare notes, "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players," our times of authentic, genuine self-expression have become rare or non-existent. From the earliest ages, we learn what people like; what they don't, what gets us approval and other positive reinforcement; what most often brings disapproval or even punishment. And during most periods of history, these lies of conformity, following herd instinct, and status quo acceptance bring the most approval. The creative, the innovators, the inventors, the changing world-view catalysts all too easily and frequently find themselves poisoned, reviled, burned at the stake, crucified, criticized, and condemned. And so, most of us, most of the time act out these elaborate but by now almost instinctual roles.
Attempts at open, honest communication—challenging even with one person—become almost impossible in groups. If we define "lie" as any verbal departure from what we deeply feel and think, almost inevitably, the larger the group we speak to, the bigger the lie. The larger the group, the broader the cultural denominator and the less tolerance for divergent views. This could explain why politicians have such a universal reputation for not telling the truth.
Quotes (93)
“I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!”
“Those who imagine truth in lies and see lies in truth, only follow a meaningless path of unhappiness and suffering.”
“Were there no question of advantage, the honest would be as likely to lie as the liar, and the liar would tell the truth as readily as the honest man.”
“The rulers of the State are the only ones who should have the privilege of lying either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the State.”
“What does ‘understanding words’ mean? With half-truths, it means knowing what is concealed; with seductive words, knowing the trap created; with deceitful words, seeing the lies; with evasive words, understanding the desperation behind the language.”
“No other evil we know is faster than Rumor, small and timid at first, then borne on a light air, she flits over ground while hiding her head on a cloud-top.”
“Mortals go to war so that they can inherit dust, their vision distorted by the lie that they value which is nothing.”
“at last somebody really cares about you, somebody is not playing a game of hypocrisy, is not going to tell you a lie in order to please you, which is what has been happening throughout your whole life”
“Even your belief in deception is a lie.”
“One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blow for ever dies.”
“It is a world full of lies, and we shall make no mistake if we make up our minds that what we hear is really not at all strange and unusual but merely exaggerated in the telling.”
“If a statement is true or false depends on the heart of the speaker, not on the words he uses. Without meeting the person in question, it is impossible to tell.”
“Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. Animals have little, but that little is useful and true. Better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood.”
“Cunning and deceit will serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune.”
“Truth is as naked and open daylight that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure”
“When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her though I know she lies, ...
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.”
“Do not believe, or like, lightly… Lying is the usual thing, so then let belief be unusual.”
“Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.”
“The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.”
“When one has destroyed an error, there is always someone who resuscitates it. One must combat ceaselessly.”
“What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on…”
“Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude.”
“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”
“It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."”
“We retail and mangle truth. So that we may deceive others with a tranquil conscience, we begin with deceiving ourselves.”
“The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.”
“If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.”
“If you stroke a cat, it will purr; if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face even though the praise is a palpable lie.”
“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”
“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.”
“Theology is the science of the divine lie, jurisprudence the science of the human lie, and metaphysics and idealistic philosophy the science of the half-lie”
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
“The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.”
“Truth consists not in never lying but in knowing when to lie and when not to do so... Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well... The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.”
“Everybody lies...every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.”
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
“No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep. …”
“People rarely tell a deliberate lie, in most cases they think they speak the truth. And yet they lie all the time, both when they wish to lie and when they wish to speak the truth, both to themselves and to others. This is why most never understand either themselves or anyone else.”
“It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.”
“I say one thing, you write another, and those who read you understand still something else!”
“In times of great passion, the duty of the intellectual is to remain silent because in times of passion one has to lie and the intellectual has no right to lie.”
“Something always remains and sticks from the most impudent lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned with the art of lying in this world know only too well, and hence they stop at nothing to achieve this end.”
“People lie all the time and most times we are clueless and fall for it. Sometimes, we choose to believe the lie and then blame someone else when it catches up to us. You can pick the lie, fall for it, turn your back on the truth; but, don’t bother screaming when it stabs you in the back.”
“What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”
“"I tell so many lies I have to write them down and keep them in the lie box so I can keep them straight."”
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”
“Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.”
“Animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time... What is it that enables certain flowers to resemble nubile insects, or opossums to play dead, or female fireflies to change the code of their flashes in order to attract, and then eat, males of a different species?... we could restrict the research to them, putting off the real truth about ourselves for the several centuries we need to catch our breath.”
“Society persuades the individual to do what it wants by making it appear that its commands are the individual's inmost self... I am actually being controlled by other people's words and gestures masquerading as my inner or better self.”
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
“Man has a false heart in his mouth for the world to see, another in his breast to show to his special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except to himself alone, hidden only God knows where.”
“Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.”
“The untold story mothers the lie… the story has no beginning and no story has an end… the story is never true but the lie is indeed the child of silence.”
“At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about.”
“You're telling all those lies about the good things that we can have if we close our eyes”
“All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
“From the absolute point of view, to speak about truth is inevitably to lie, yet it is the very nature of truth to communicae itself.”
“You're telling all those lies about the good things that we can have if we only close our eyes… Do what you want to and go where you're going to; think for yourself, cause I won't be there with you”
“Every society produces its own cultural conceits, a set of lies and delusions about itself that thrives in the face of all contrary evidence.”
“We are far from the only dishonest species, but we are surely the most dishonest… honesty can be a major blunder.”
“We deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better… Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue”
“Each of us is descended from innumerable generations of men who lied, cheated, charmed, bullied, or killed their way to sexual intercourse, and from innumerable generations of women who charmed, seduced, lied, or manipulated their way to extracting economic privileges in return for access to their bodies.”
“Americans may be under-educated, lazy, and disorganized, but they do one thing better than any people on the face of the earth, and that is watch television... You can tell lies to them and they'll never know.”
“Anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.”
“The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need”
“For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide that are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. In the earth 21st Century, the average human is far more likely to die from binging on McDonald's than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack”
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