Quotes About Loss

He concluded that there was effectively no way for an accountant assigned to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money.

People's emotional response to extremely long odds led them to reverse their usual taste for risk, and to become risk seeking when pursuing a long-shot gain and risk avoiding when faced with the extremely remote possibility of loss. (Which is why they bought both lottery tickets and insurance.)

The model he'd built with his daughter showed that there was no difference between giving a person a vaccine and removing him or her from the social network: in each case, a person lost the ability to infect others.

When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

Despair floods the minds of unemployed beeper manufacturers, Rolex watch salesmen, and society florists.

For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.

A loss, according to the theory, was when a person wound up worse off than his "reference point." But what was this reference point? The easy answer was: wherever you started from.

Between 1845 and 1852 the country experienced the single greatest loss of population in world history: in a nation of 8 million, 1.5 million people left. Another million Irish people starved to death, or died from the effects of hunger. Inside of a decade the nation went from being among the most densely populated in Europe to one of the least.

It reflects a general property of the human organism as a pleasure machine. For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.

But as revenues subsided, costs all of a sudden mattered, too.

But it implied, as utility theory never had, that it was as easy to get people to take risks as it was to get them to avoid them. All you had to do was present them with a choice that involved a loss. In the more than two hundred years since Bernoulli started the discussion, intellectuals had regarded risk-seeking behavior as a curiosity. If risk seeking was woven into human nature, as Danny and Amos's theory implied that it was, why hadn't people noticed it before?

This one they called "framing." Simply by changing the description of a situation, and making a gain seem like a loss, you could cause people to completely flip their attitude toward risk, and turn them from risk avoiding to risk seeking.

The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo," Danny wrote in a memo to Amos. "When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.

Actually, they soon discovered, you had to reduce the amount of the certain loss even further if you wanted to get people to accept it. When choosing between sure things and gambles, people's desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

From the point of view of the history of the universe, Max's death was not a big deal," said Eisman. "It was just my big deal." At

The book, truth be told, left the reader feeling that there was little that might have been done to prevent all those people from dying.

Cross-legged on the floor, you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone, your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in. Messages on the phone you can't bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.

The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed. —Søren Kierkegaard The Sickness Unto Death

In the months of her slow death, she'd made little notes in a book, jotted down memories of her early life, as if gathering fallen leaves to her chest, to stop them from being scattered and lost by the coming winds.

When someone you have loved dies, you accept the fact of his or her death, but then the person goes on living in your memory, dreams, and reveries. You have imaginary conversations with him or her, you see something striking and remind yourself to tell your loved one about it and then get brought up short by the knowledge of the fact of his or her death, and at night, in your sleep, the dead person visits you.

All deaths are sudden, no matter how gradual the dying may be.

Merle Weaver stroked the little girl's hair and thought of the two corpses in the rear of the truck.

Something deep in the human soul awakens as things fall apart. Something in the soul knows that everything in this world can become lost. And something in the soul knows how to survive periods of devastation, disorientation and loss. Descent and falling is the way of the soul from its beginning. We each fell from the womb of life when the waters of the inner sea broke and it came time for us to breathe on our own.

Corum stood over the corpse of his mother, the gentle Princess Colatalarna. His first blow split the forehead of the leading horse and it fell, dragging the others down with it.