320 pages
Rating: (11.7K votes)
“the confidence people express often reflects their personalities rather than their knowledge, memory, or abilities.”
“Your moment-to-moment expectations, more than the visual distinctiveness of the object, determine what you see—and what you miss.”
“Beware of memories accompanied by strong emotions and vivid details—they are just as likely to be wrong as mundane memories, but you’re far less likely to realize it.”
“Hofstadter’s law tells us: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
“the more attention-demanding tasks your brain does, the worse it does each one.”
“People are confident that they can drive and talk on the phone simultaneously precisely because they almost never encounter evidence that they cannot.”
“ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
“confidence and ability can diverge so far that relying on the former becomes a gigantic mental trap,”
“we easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we understand and can explain things that we really know very little about.”
“But as you’ll see in this chapter, the confidence that people project, whether they are diagnosing a patient, making decisions about foreign policy, or testifying in court, is all too often an illusion.”
“Unlike the rankings published for most sports, the chess rating system is extremely accurate; for practical purposes, your rating is a nearly perfect indicator of your ability.”
“The human mind’s tendency to promiscuously perceive meaningful visual patterns in randomness has a one-word name: pareidolia.”
“Both experimental and epidemiological studies show that the driving impairments caused by talking on a cell phone are comparable to the effects of driving while legally intoxicated.”
“Ellen Goodman wrote, “The very same people who use cell phones … are convinced that they should be taken out of the hands of (other) idiots who use them.”
“Expertise helps you notice unexpected events, but only when the event happens in the context of your expertise.”
“Be wary of your intuitions, especially intuitions about how your own mind works.”
“I cannot combine some characters
dhcmrlchtdj
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.”
“I read once that the best thing that can happen to a woman is to get her heart broken. Before that, she has no real sense of herself. No real sense of pain, because only in love does she know what it’s like to find the one thing that gives her breath and then to lose it.
After that she knows she can survive. No matter what relationships come and go, she can count on herself to pull through, and although it hurts, the break is necessary.”
“This is why people like writing. You visit old friends without having to go on Facebook and see what they’re up to and deal with what idiots called FOMO. You make them into what you want them to be, the people they could be if only they were braver, smarter.”
“Everything's better under the stars, I suppose. If we get another life after we die, I'll meet you there, old sport...”
“The One
I don’t want you to love me because I’m good for you, because I say and do all the right things. Because I am everything you have been looking for.
I want to be the one that you didn’t see coming. The one who gets under your skin. Who makes you unsteady. Who makes you question everything you have ever believed about love. Who makes you feel reckless and out of control. The one you are infuriatingly and inexplicably drawn to.
I don’t want to be the one who tucks you into bed—I want to be the reason why you can’t sleep at night.”
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