Quote collection
205 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period."
"Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don't know the odds. It's a big difference."
"We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random."
"Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed."
"The evidence is unequivocal, there's a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich."
"When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing."
"Doubting what you see is a very odd experience. And doubting what you remember is a little less odd than doubting what you see. But it's also a pretty odd experience, because some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them, and that happens to be the case even for memories that are not true."
"... sometimes when you are asked a question that is difficult, the mind doesn't stay silent if it doesn't have the answer. The mind produces something, and what it produces very characteristically is the answer to an easier but related question."
"We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: high-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action."
"You should not take your intuitions at face value."
"Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages."
"The conclusion is straightforward : self-control requires attention and effort."
"One thing we have lost, that we had in the past, is a sense of progress, that things are getting better. There is a sense of volatility, but not of progress."
"People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child."
"If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea."
"We have a very narrow view of what is going on."
"We're not aware of changing our minds even when we do change our minds. And most people, after they change their minds, reconstruct their past opinion - they believe they always thought that."
"Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that."
"Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty."
"One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others."