Quotes from Roy F. Baumeister

What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.

For most of us, though, the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them.

The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.

the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan.

The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you'll produce more with less effort in the long run.

Restraining sexual impulses takes energy, and so does creative work. If you pour energy into your art, you have less available to restrain your libido.

However you define success—a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions—it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities.

Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim.

lock yourself into a virtuous path.

Religion deals with the highest levels of meaning. As a result, it can interpret each life or each event in a context that runs from the beginning of time to future eternity. Religion is thus uniquely capable of offering high-level meaning to human life. Religion may not always be the best way to make life meaningful, but it is probably the most reliable way.

That's the result of hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore temptations when they're not immediately available, but once they're right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals.

We've said that willpower is humans' greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations. Save it for emergencies. As

But the eventual results were too intriguing to ignore. When people were placed in front of a mirror, or told that their actions were being filmed, they consistently changed their behavior. These self-conscious people worked harder at laboratory tasks. They gave more valid answers to questionnaires (meaning that their answers jibed more closely with their actual behavior). They were more consistent in their actions, and their actions were also more consistent with their values.

The reliance on judgments by others is essential. Indeed, if we limited our examination of evil to acts that perpetrators themselves acknowledge as evil, there would be hardly any such acts to examine.

Illusions, distortions, and self-deception appear to be integral to the way normal, well-adjusted people perceive the world. Seeing things as they really are is associated with depression and low self-esteem.

Because of the importance of perceiving the means as morally acceptable, there may be a strong ongoing need for justification in idealistic evil. The person is doing something that would normally be regarded as wrong, such as killing or hurting people. Somehow, the person must sustain the belief that it is right. This is often done by focusing on the goodness of the overriding goal.

The use of violent or oppressive means to solve problems is a common feature in both instrumental and idealistic evil. There is an important difference, however, and that is the extent to which the ends justify the means.

As a general pattern, suffering stimulates a quest for meaningful explanation.

Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, "The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts." The

Evil is but rarely found in the perpetrator's own selfimage. It is far more commonly found in the judgments of others.

Dieters have a fixed target in mind for their maximum daily calories, and when they exceed it for some unexpected reason, such as being given a pair of large milkshakes in an experiment, they regard their diet as blown for the day. That day is therefore mentally classified as a failure, regardless of what else happens. Virtue cannot resume until tomorrow.

First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three on down.

A first conclusion was that the actions seemed much less evil—less wrong—to the perpetrators than to the victims.

Emotional control typically relies on various subtle tricks, such as changing how one thinks about the problem at hand, or distracting oneself. Hence,