Quotes About Perspective

Surprisingly, being smart can actually make bias worse. Let me give you a different intuitive frame: the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.

This is why poker players remind themselves that poker is one long game. We would all do well to remember that life is one long game as well.

Being in the losses is as much a state of mind as anything else. We don't see ourselves as being in the gains, even though we've gone farther than where we started, because we're not measuring ourselves by how far we are past the starting line. We're measuring ourselves by whether we're short of the finish line.

Our problem is that we're ticker watchers of our own lives. Happiness (however we individually define it) is not best measured by looking at the ticker, zooming in and magnifying moment-by-moment or day-by-day movements. We would be better off thinking about our happiness as a long-term stock holding. We would do well to view our happiness through a wide-angle lens, striving for a long, sustaining upward trend in our happiness stock, so it resembles the first Berkshire Hathaway chart.

The size of the range signals what you know and what you don't know. The larger the range, the less information or the lower the quality of the information informing your estimate, and the more you need to learn. Communicating the size of the range also signals to others that you need their knowledge and perspective to narrow the range.

The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them.

It doesn't so much matter where we end up as how we got there. What has happened in the recent past drives our emotional response much more than how we are doing overall. That's how we can win $100 and be sad, and lose $100 and be happy.

As you build things, whether they're train tracks, or bookshelves, or relationships, or essays that you've written for classes, the endowment effect gaffs the scale even more, further escalating our commitment to failing causes.

It's not just that we need to set more flexible goals. We ourselves also need to be more flexible in the way we evaluate success and failure.

Daniel Gilbert)????????????????????(Stumbling on Happiness,

It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.

There are many possible futures, but only one past. This makes the past feel inevitable, as even the tiniest of twigs now looks like the thickest of branches because it's the only thing you can see.

It doesn't take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief.

Whether it is a football game, a protest, or just about anything else, our pre-existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world. That those beliefs aren't formed in a particularly orderly way leads to all sorts of mischief in our decision-making.

Quand je lis Proust ou Mauriac, je ne crois pas qu'ils évoquent le temps où mon père était enfant. Son cadre à lui c'est le Moyen Âge.

Neither of us had mentioned the word abortion, not even once. This thing had no place in language.

Es interesante, en realidad!… En el momento actual no podemos saber qué, con el tiempo, llegará a tenerse por importante y qué por lastimoso y ridículo.

Aver vissuto una cosa, qualsiasi cosa, conferisce il diritto inalienabile di scriverla. Non ci sono verità inferiori.

Une autre fois, sa stupéfaction a été sans bornes, de me voir parler anglais avec un auto-stoppeur qu'un client avait pris dans son camion. Que j'aie appris une langue étrangère en classe, sans aller dans le pays, le laissait incrédule.

There were the other girls, with their empty bellies, and there was me.

Je dis souvent « nous » maintenant, parce que j'ai longtemps pensé de cette façon et je ne sais pas quand j'ai cessé de le faire.

Dans les rues, les gens qu'il saluait étaient toujours des jeunes, souvent des étudiants. Quand il s'arrêtait pour leur parler, je me tenais à l'écart, ils me regardaient furtivement. Après, il me racontait le parcours universitaire de celui que nous avions croisé, détaillant ses réussites ou ses échecs.

She has no defined self, but "selves" who pass from one book to another.

Avec mon mari, autrefois, je me sentais une fille du peuple, avec lui j'étais une bourge.