Quotes from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

320 pages

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“the confidence people express often reflects their personalities rather than their knowledge, memory, or abilities.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“Your moment-to-moment expectations, more than the visual distinctiveness of the object, determine what you see—and what you miss.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“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.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“Hofstadter’s law tells us: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“the more attention-demanding tasks your brain does, the worse it does each one.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us



“People are confident that they can drive and talk on the phone simultaneously precisely because they almost never encounter evidence that they cannot.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“confidence and ability can diverge so far that relying on the former becomes a gigantic mental trap,”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“we easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we understand and can explain things that we really know very little about.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“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.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us



“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.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“The human mind’s tendency to promiscuously perceive meaningful visual patterns in randomness has a one-word name: pareidolia.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“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.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“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.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


“Expertise helps you notice unexpected events, but only when the event happens in the context of your expertise.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us



“Be wary of your intuitions, especially intuitions about how your own mind works.”
― quote from The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us


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“My Prince Charming turned out to be the villain of my fairy tale. ”
― J.M. Darhower, quote from Monster in His Eyes


“Babamukuru was always impressive when he made these speeches of his. He was a rigid, imposing perfectionist, steely enough in character to function in the puritanical way that he expected, or rather insisted, that the rest of the world should function. Luckily, or maybe unluckily for him, throughout his life Babamukuru had found himself - as eldest child and son, as an early educated African, as headmaster, as husband and father, as provider to many - in positions that enabled him to organise his immediate world and its contents as he wished. Even when this was not the case, as when he went to the mission as a young boy, the end result of such periods of submission was greater power than before. Thus he had been insulated from the necessity of considering alternatives unless they were his own. Stoically he accepted his divinity. Filled with awe, we accepted it too. We used to marvel at how benevolent that divinity was. Babamukuru was good. We all agreed on this. More significantly still, Babamukuru was right.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, quote from Nervous Conditions


“And the dead will be commemorated and we’ll struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”
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― Anne Bishop, quote from Murder of Crows


“You see how good and evil are twisted together?
Like a golden dragon bracelet snaking brightly about a person's arm.”
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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