Last Updated on September 6, 2024
If you live long enough, you will experience being lied to and manipulated. You’ve probably told your own little white lies, as well. But even well-meaning deception can eventually balloon into bigger, more wounding lies down the road.
When asked why they do what they do, liars usually reason out that they don’t want to disappoint the other party. That’s why they don’t tell the truth. But in the end, the longer they hold on to those false claims, the more they in fact, deceive themselves.
What To Do for When You’ve Been Lied To
One of the first things you should do once you find out that you’ve been lied to is to keep a calm head. You will feel a lot of things during this time: anger, hurt, confusion, and even denial. These are normal. If you want to talk to someone, seek out someone you trust, or a professional (e.g. your therapist).
Avoid telling the town that you’ve been lied to. Inasmuch as you think it’s justified to snitch against the person who lied to you, two wrongs don’t make a right. You’ll end up stirring gossip, and making others hate your enemy is more juvenile than mature.
If you feel the need to confront the person, do so gently. Ask them for their reasons for the deception. Listen to their side of the story. Of course, make the decision on whether or not to give them the benefit of the doubt. More than forgiving the person who lied to you, you should forgive yourself.
It’s never easy to find out that you’ve been lied to. But know that it wasn’t your fault. Here are some wise quotes about lies and liars that should shed a little bit of light as to what you’re going through.
Quotes about Lies and Liars
1. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them. – Samuel Butler
2. Better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie. – Khaled Hosseini
3. We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding. – Rudyard Kipling
4. …Even a tiny bit of deceit is dishonorable when it’s used for selfish or cowardly reasons. – Jeanne Birdsall
5. When people cheat in any arena, they diminish themselves-they threaten their own self-esteem and their relationships with others by undermining the trust they have in their ability to succeed and in their ability to be true. – Cheryl Hughes
6. It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one. – George Washington
7. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. – Mark Twain
8. The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept. – George Carlin
9. Over time, any deception destroys intimacy, and without intimacy couples cannot have true and lasting love. – Bonnie Eaker Weil
10. I never lie,” I said offhand. “At least not to those I don’t love. – Anne Rice
11. When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie. – Criss Jami
12. One lie has the power to tarnish a thousand truths. – Al David
13. The truly scary thing about undiscovered lies is that they have a greater capacity to diminish us than exposed ones. – Cheryl Hughes
14. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. – Sara Shepard
15. Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul. – Patricia Briggs
16. The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as facts could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else. – J.K. Rowling
17. Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others. – Fyodor Dostoevsky
18. At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right. – Miguel de Unamuno
19. If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself. – W. Somerset Maugham
20. Cheating and lying aren’t struggles, they’re reasons to break up. – Patti Callahan Henry
21. To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend. – Jacques Derrida
22. When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie. – Yevgeny Yevtushenko
23. Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies. – Dorothy Allison
24. Anything is better than lies and deceit! – Leo Tolstoy
25. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. – Abraham Lincoln
26. A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies. – Alfred Tennyson
27. No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar. – Abraham Lincoln
28. Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they’re honest about everything. – Chuck Klosterman
29. The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them. – Elena Gorokhova
30. Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth. – David Mitchell
31. Lying is easy. But it’s lonely. – Victoria Schwab
32. Lying is the most fun a woman can have without taking her clothes off. – Natalie Portman
33. It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once they got started. – Kim Edwards
34. Stop lying to yourself. When we deny our own truth, we deny our own potential. – Steve Maraboli
35. He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it the second time. – Thomas Jefferson
36. There is nothing worse for the lying soul than the mirror of reality. – Steve Maraboli
37. Lie until even you believe it – that’s the real secret of lying – Holly Black
38. The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up. – Robert A. Heinlein
39. Truth is as straight as an arrow, while a lie swivels like a snake. – Suzy Kassem
40. There’s a tipping point with lies, a point where you’ve said something so many times that it feels truer than the truth. – Holly Black
41. Lying is wrong. When you tell a lie for the sake of sparing someone’s feelings it is not suddenly right, but it is compassionate. And is not compassion a form of love? Love—the greatest of all virtues! So, my darling, I do wrong for you. I lie that you might feel loved. – Richelle E. Goodrich
42. Sometimes you lie to deceive people. Sometimes you lie because you need the lie to become the truth. – Rick Riordan
43. I suppose we all lie to ourselves sometimes. – Cassandra Clare
44. There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one. – Alexander McCall Smith
45. Telling one lie almost always requires another, and before the storyteller knows it, they will be caught inside of their own web. – Jenna Alatari
46. The more you believe, the more you’ll be leaving you, when what you believed turns out to be just lies. Or unjust lies. Or any lies, anyway. – Will Advise
47. Lies rob us of our trust and we project our untrustworthiness onto everyone around us. Have you ever noticed that the innocent are very trusting? They neither lie nor hold other people’s lies against them. Liars, on the other hand, see sabotage everywhere. – Donna Goddard
48. Sometimes lying is a real pleasure. – Holly Black
49. Most promises were broken before they were made. – Craig D. Lounsbrough
50. It’s difficult to honest with others when you continue lying to yourself. – Carlos Wallace
51. I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie. – Michel de Montaigne
52. The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool. – Stephen King
53. A lie is enough to prove you are a liar. Lies help people to forget about the things you have done in the past and remain constant for whole future as doubt. – Nishan Panwar
54. Liars are always ready to take oaths. – Vittorio Alfieri
55. Liars are the cause of all the sins and crimes in the world. – Epictetus
56. A good liar knows that the most efficient lie is always a truth that has had a key piece removed from it. – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers. – Charles Peguy
58. The essence of lying is in deception, not in words. – John Ruskin
59. Liars are always most disposed to swear. – Vittorio Alfieri
60. Lying is done with words, and also with silence. – Adrienne Rich
61. The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves. – Derek Landy
62. The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head. – Terry Pratchett
63. I’d rather hear an ugly truth, rather than an obscure lie. – Ana Monnar
64. We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves. – Eric Hoffer
65. It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived. – Rene Descartes
66. Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end. – Lauren DeStefano
67. I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself. – Ruta Sepetys
68. The naked truth is always better than the best-dressed lie. – Ann Landers
69. A liar is always lavish of oaths. – Pierre Corneille
70. That is the curse of lying. Once you place that crown of the liar upon your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time. – Terry Goodkind
71. The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul. – E.M. Forster
72. Given a choice between life and death, choose life. Given a choice between right and wrong, choose what’s right. And given a choice between a terrible truth and a beautiful lie, choose the truth every time. – Mira Grant
73. Lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them. – Gabrielle Zevin
74. There are different ways to be confused about how someone’s disappointed you. Some lie about the future because they wanted to forget the past. But some will lie about the past because they think it will give you both a future. – Laura Dave
75. Our lie is like a cancer that’s spread to every single area of our lives. – Simone Elkeles
76. The tongue may hide the truth but the eyes, never! – Mikhail Bulgakov
77. If what he said was the truth, it broke her heart. If what he said was a lie, it was broken anyway. – Christine Feehan
78. Lies have expiry dates but the truth never expires – Oche Otorkpa
79. The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become. – Mitch Albom
80. A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself. – Daniel Wallace
81. There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good? – Jodi Picoult
82. It was hard to live normally when you were constantly pretending you didn’t see what was going on in front of your face. – Cassandra Clare
83. I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you. – Friedrich Nietzsche
84. No one believes a liar. Even when she’s telling the truth. – Sara Shepard
85. If you don’t want to slip up tomorrow, speak the truth today. – Bruce Lee
