A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.
All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
Everyone is born sincere and die deceivers.
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father, will be the most daring in deceiving others.
I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.
I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.
It is twice the pleasure to deceive the deceiver.
It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the ''fronts'' people assume before one another's eyes, and the ''front'' a writer puts on the face of reality.
Life is the art of being well deceived.
Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.
No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.
Nothing is more common on earth than to deceive and be deceived.
Subtlety may deceive you; integrity never will.
The art of pleasing is the art of deception.
The art of using deceit and cunning grow continually weaker and less effective to the user.