"The man who lies to himself can..." - Quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill--he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it.
More by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?”
“To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.”
“It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!”
More on Self Deception
“The criminal is quite frequently not equal to his deed: he belittles and slanders it.”
“when we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it; we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.”
“Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?”