Quotes About Life

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing song.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.

the mystery of knowing without knowing is not a distinctive feature of intuition; it is the norm of mental life.

Human beings have invented the concept of "risk" to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as "real risk" or "objective risk.

Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

We spend much of our day anticipating, and trying to avoid, the emotional pains we inflict on ourselves. How seriously should we take these intangible outcomes, the self-administered punishments (and occasional rewards) that we experience as we score our lives?

Americans, provides a surprisingly definite answer to the most frequently asked question in well-being research: Can money buy happiness? The conclusion is that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one's life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being.

The remembering self is the one that answers the question: "How was it, on the whole?" Memories are all we get to keep from our experience of living, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?

Most importantly, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

Capacidade para surpresa é um aspecto essencial de nossa vida mental, e a própria surpresa é o indicativo mais sensível de como compreendemos nosso mundo e o que esperamos dele.

One reason for the low correlations between individuals' circumstances and their satisfaction with life is that both experienced happiness and life satisfaction are largely determined by the genetics of temperament. A disposition for well-being is as heritable as height or intelligence, as demonstrated by studies of twins separated at birth.

I had stumbled onto a significant fact of the human condition: the feedback to which life exposes us is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.

if you follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random event as systematic. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.

Life, however, is usually a between-subjects experiment

Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

We all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

People who have experienced nothing love to tell stories while people who have experienced a great deal suddenly have no stories to tell at all.

Natürlich, es ist das Ende, und wir sterben. Aber das heißt nicht, dass wir nicht noch lange da sein, andere Menschen finden, spazierengehen, nachts träumen und alles erledigen können, was eine Marionette so tut.

Man hat uns früh eingeredet, dass ein Leben Publikum benötigt.

È bizzarro e ingiusto, disse Gauss, il fatto che si nasce in una determinata epoca e, volenti o nolenti, vi si resta imprigionati: un esempio calzante della penosa accidentalità dell'esistenza. Così uno ha un vantaggio spropositato rispetto al passato e diventa lo zimbello del futuro.

Seltsam sei es und ungerecht, sagte Gauß, so recht ein Beispiel für die erbärmliche Zufälligkeit der Existenz, dass man in einer bestimmten Zeit geboren und ihr verhaftet sei, ob man wolle oder nicht. Es verschaffe einem einen unziemlichen Vorteil vor der Vergangenheit und mache einen zum Clown der Zukunft.