Quotes About Perspective

Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?

Sometimes what seems to be a difference in opinions is in fact just a difference in definitions.

If you think your odds of solving your problem are bad, don't rule out the possibility that what is really happening is that you are bad at estimating odds.

Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don't know why.

Skeptics," he said, "suffer from the skeptics' disease— the problem of being right too often.

Being absolutely right and being spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same.

Women believe that men are, in a sense, defective versions of women, Men believe that women are defective versions of men. Both genders are trapped in a delusion that their personal viewpoints are universal. That viewpoint—that each gender is a defective version of the other—is the root of all misunderstandings.

Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot.

Unhappiness that is caused by too much success is a high-class problem. That's the sort of unhappiness people work all of their lives to get. If you find yourself there, and I hope you do, you'll find your attention naturally turning outward. You'll seek happiness through service to others. I promise it will feel wonderful.

Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue

If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.

If you think more privacy is always better, that is a case of loserthink. Every situation is different. Sometimes privacy is the problem that prevents the solution.

If you want to understand UFOs, reincarnation and God, do not study UFOs, reincarnation and God. Study people.

Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That's exactly how you look to them.

If you can't imagine any other explanation for a set of facts, it might be because you are bad at imagining things.

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them.

Inaccurate worldviews are the only kind there is.

Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend.

What does it mean to feel something similar to the way God feels? Is that like saying a pebble is similar to the sun because both are round?" he responded. "Maybe God designed our brains to feel love the same way he feels it. He could do that if he wanted to.

Confirmation bias looks exactly like knowledge gained from doing your own research.

To be fair to Nietzsche, he probably meant the word 'stronger' to include anything that makes you more capable. I'd ask him to clarify, but ironically he ran out of things that didn't kill him.

imagine where our current delusions about reality might lead us.

inaccurate worldviews are the only kind there is. Does

to letting the environment dictate how you feel on any given day, it would be like a minor superpower.