320 pages
Rating: (11.7K votes)
“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
“I’ll never regret you. You’re everything to me.”
― Lisa De Jong, quote from When It Rains
“You almost died, you little shit.”
― Thea Harrison, quote from Dragon Bound
“Really. Is there anything nice to be said about other people's vacations?”
― Amor Towles, quote from Rules of Civility
“It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, quote from Eating Animals
“Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love, and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible. Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility, and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witness--powerless and shame-filled--to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies, which would be slow at first, then increasingly rapid; above all, they would have to look after children, mortal enemies, in their own homes, they would have to pamper them, feed them, worry about their illnesses, provide the means for their education and their pleasure, and unlike in the world of animals, this would last not just for a season, they would remain slaves of their offspring always, the time of joy was well and truly over for them, they would have to continue to suffer until the end, in pain and with increasing health problems, until they were no longer good for anything and were definitively thrown into the rubbish heap, cumbersome and useless. In return, their children would not be at all grateful, on the contrary their efforts, however strenuous, would never be considered enough, they would, until the bitter end, be considered guilty because of the simple fact of being parents. From this sad life, marked by shame, all joy would be pitilessly banished. When they wanted to draw near to young people's bodies, they would be chased away, rejected, ridiculed, insulted, and, more and more often nowadays, imprisoned. The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. This was the true meaning of solidarity between generations; it was a pure and simple holocaust of each generation in favor of the one that replaced it, a cruel, prolonged holocaust that brought with it no consolation, no comfort, nor any material or emotional compensation.”
― Michel Houellebecq, quote from The Possibility of an Island
The Story of San Mic...
Ricochet
Walking on Water: Re...
Don't...
First Touch
Moral Letters to Luc...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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
