Quotes About Perception

Labeling we use to define a boy only obscures him. It is of no help to boys and no help to us, either.

When we look at such boy play through the adult lens of violence, we miss the opportunity to use it as a window into a boy's hidden emotions.

To be physically astute and psychologically tended, yet morally insulated and conceptually blind--is to be crazy, not healthy.

Your body knows in all its parts, when 'used to' starts, when nothing will ever be the way it's been. Your body knows first. Takes your 'you' weeks to catch up.

Great investors conceptualize problems differently than other investors. These investors don't succeed by accessing better information; they succeed by using the information differently than others." Michael J. Mauboussin,

Paranoia is a finer scale of reality.

A core feature of this chapter is the notion that thoughts don't need to be true to have powerful effects on mood and motivation. Because of this, it is important to treat thoughts as guesses about the world, rather than facts.

I think; therefore, I am above average.

Studies show that most people rate themselves well above average when it comes to ethical behavior. In fact, a newsmagazine poll asked people whom they thought would get to heaven. Bill Clinton was a toss-up, getting 52 percent backing from respondents. Former basketball star Michael Jordan did better, at 62 percent. Mother Teresa topped the two American men with 79 percent. But she was not the highest. That honor went to "yourself," with 87 percent.

George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: "That's some weird shit.

He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer—whose personal mantra would shortly become "You can't make this shit up"—to argue his case in a media moment that turned Spicer, quite a buttoned-down political professional, into a national joke, which he seemed destined to never recover from. To boot, the president blamed Spicer for not making the million phantom souls seem real.

on the most basic level, Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a fuck. You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn't believe you.

Here was another peculiar Trump attribute: an inability to see his actions the way most others saw them. Or to fully appreciate how people expected him to behave. The notion of the presidency as an institutional and political concept, with an emphasis on ritual and propriety and semiotic messaging—statesmanship—was quite beyond him.

He is—and this is a fundamental entrepreneurial talent—a master illusionist. It's the essential entrepreneurial skill, to convince people you are what you have yet to become.

A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar—except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not.

They were all concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough method to his madness.

Donald Trump, even more than his father, was perceived as a vulgarian—after all, he put his name on his buildings, quite a déclassé thing to do.

said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.

it confirmed Bannon's worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.

Here was yet another battle to be won or lost. Bannon regarded Kushner and Cohn (and Ivanka) as occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump revolution. Kushner and Cohn saw Bannon as not just destructive but self-destructive, and they were confident he would destroy himself before he destroyed them. In the Trump White House, observed Henry Kissinger, "it is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.

Trump's entire world was construed from what he saw on television.

you don't know what he hears because he just talks.

Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited.

The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol.