To believe in the efficacy of our actions may be to indulge a delusion, but it is a delusion that, like the delusions upon which sense perception is built, is required for us to live properly.
But even if this all were true and I were accused of it with good reason, what do you know, what could you know about the amount of self-preserving cunning, or reason and higher protection that is contained in such self-deception — and how much falseness I still require so that I may keep permitting myself the luxury of my truthfulness?… Enough, I am still alive; and life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception — but wouldn’t you know it?1
- Friedrich Nietzsche : Human, All-Too-Human : Preface↩