The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.
~ Francis Bacon

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.
~ Christian Nevell Bovee

The easiest way to be cheated is to believe yourself to be more cunning than others.
~ Pierre Charron

Subtlety may deceive you; integrity never will.
~ Oliver Cromwell

Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.
~ Desiderius Erasmus

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don't have brains enough to be honest.
~ Benjamin Franklin

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?
~ Benjamin Franklin

Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.
~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.
~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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.
~ Christopher Hampton

Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.
~ William Hazlitt

Life is the art of being well deceived.
~ William Hazlitt

The people of the world having once been deceived, suspect deceit in truth itself.
~ Hitopadesa

Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
~ Homer

He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father, will be the most daring in deceiving others.
~ Horace

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
~ William James

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.
~ Samuel Johnson

It is twice the pleasure to deceive the deceiver.
~ Jean De La Fontaine

The sure way to be cheated is to think one's self more cunning than others.
~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The craftiest trickery are too short and ragged a cloak to cover a bad heart.
~ Johann Kaspar Lavater