Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
At the end, we can embrace and love whatever we want of an author's work. But we also can't ignore a writer's express wish just because we don't happen to agree with it.
The goals of literature are multifold, but creating nice, positive protagonists that you'd want to grab drinks with or invite home to mom can hardly be considered one of them.
No one would deny that feeling envy is unpleasant, or that feeling envious sometimes leads us down a path we wish we hadn't taken. Envy is frequently corrosive and destructive.
Finding the one right candidate in a group is hard, and companies don't have much time to figure out exactly which questions can help them tell similar-seeming candidates apart.
The truth is that we have no idea what the long-term effects of any artificial enhancement may be. Will our brains be able to withstand running at artificially heightened capacity?
Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds.
Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.
I really had to go back and remind myself that trusting makes society function on an individual level related to health and on a social level related to economic growth and development.
An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces.
As children, we are remarkably aware. We absorb and process information at a speed that we'll never again come close to achieving... we are learning about our world and its possibilities.
I can understand pulling a book whose contents have been questioned - after all, false information has a way of sticking in your brain and seeming true when you go to retrieve it years later.
Understanding the psychology of changing norms starts from a simple insight: although we may wish to be perfectly rational and impartial, bias is an inescapable part of what it means to be human.
the most powerful mind is the quiet mind. It is the mind that is present, reflective, mindful of its thoughts and its state. It doesn't often multitask, and when it does, it does so with a purpose.
The more fluent the experience of reading a quote - or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind--the less likely we are to question the actual quotation.
Some of the elements of sleep hygiene are basically the same as good health practices. Nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol all negatively impact sleep, the more so the closer they're consumed to bedtime.
The problems of reporting a bully - or, if you are a bully, of becoming less of one - become much more intractable, because your reputation surrounds you, and behavioral patterns are harder to escape.
I've been studying, playing, living, breathing poker for eight to nine hours a day. Every day! When I'm between events and in New York, I'm reading, watching videos or live-streaming very good players.
In real life, having your poetry criticized by T.S. Eliot could cause you to doubt your poetic gifts. But imagining it in a dream has the opposite effect. That dream could become the source for a story.
Writer's block has probably existed since the invention of writing, but the term itself was first introduced into the academic literature in the nineteen-forties, by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler.
It's strange, when you think about it, that we spend close to a third of our lives asleep. Why do we do it? While we're sleeping, we're vulnerable - and, at least on the outside, supremely unproductive.
Fraternities breed leaders. That, at least, is what most any chapter website will tell you, in not so many words - and the message certainly makes for a compelling rationale for joining the Greek system.
The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.
Virtual reality has already proved useful in treating phobias and PTSD. It can help people overcome a fear of heights, for example, through simulations of standing on a balcony or walking across a bridge.
At least in the U.S., the party you believe in plays a big role in how you conceive of yourself. It feels good to think that your party is smarter, and that the smarts are what drive people to your party.
In the world of speeches and orations, especially historical ones, the persistent misquotation is understandable. You hear a speech. You misremember or mishear a line as something more colorful than it was.
Researchers have always tried to use psychology for predictive ends: Can what we already know about a person tell us how she will behave in a given situation? The results of these endeavors have been mixed.
The best confidence artist makes us feel not as if we're being taken for a ride but as if we are genuinely wonderful human beings who are acting the way wonderful human beings act and getting what we deserve.
If someone in a powerful position acts in a certain way or expresses a certain view, we implicitly assume that those actions and views are associated with power, and that emulating them may be to our advantage.
Imagination is all about new possibilities, eventualities that don't exist, counterfactuals, a recombination of elements in new ways. It is about the untested. And the untested is uncertain. It is frightening-even
Erik Seidel ended up introducing me to some of the best players in the world, a few of whom also agreed to take me on to coach me. So I had access to the best poker minds in the world to help me study and figure things out.
Spam filters are supposed to block e-mail scams from ever reaching us, but criminals have learned to circumvent them by personalizing their notes with information gleaned from the Internet and by grooming victims over time.
I find the game fascinating and poker has unlocked parts of me emotionally. I'm enjoying the process but there are moments when I'm really down. It's a ton of travel, it's exhausting, physically and emotionally. It's lonely.
We don't remember everything that happens to us on a given day: sometimes, we remember something simply because it's emotional, while, at other times, we work our way through mundane details to figure out why something matters.
I thought poker might be a perfect environment to start to learn probabilistic decision-making, and to live what it means to have skill versus chance and to see how that played out. I would dive in head first into the poker world.
And, when it comes to politics, it can be awfully difficult to put your desires aside and to acknowledge that the world is a much messier place, where open-minded people might be conservative and liberals may well be conscientious.
The perfectibility of the human mind is a theme that has captured our imagination for centuries - the notion that, with the right tools, the right approach, the right attitude, we might become better, smarter versions of ourselves.
Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We're in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can't be real.
Las vegas shouldn't exist. The incongruity hits you from the moment you first glimpse it from the airplane. First mountains, then desert, then neat squares of identical houses that look as if they were plucked straight from Monopoly.
The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.
Poker isn't the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information. Apart from the underlying mathematics, poker depends on the nuanced reading of human intention, interactions, and deceptions.
Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.
Electrodes aren't the only things we may someday start implanting in our brains. Consider what you could do with a chip in your head that linked directly to the Internet: Within milliseconds, you could retrieve just about any piece of information.
The last thing in the world I want to do is write something in memory of Walter Mischel. I still can't quite accept that he's gone. And so I procrastinate, and with every day I don't put pen to paper, I reinforce his life's work with my reluctance.
Before I found out what poker really was I had this picture in my mind of men smoking cigars and having all these chips and like going all macho and crazy. I don't think there's been that much done in the mainstream community to change that perspective.
While today's fraternities are hardly the literary- and debate-inspired groups of yore, their core mission - or, at the least, their ideal core mission and the one touted loudly in their public chapter and promotional materials - remains largely unchanged.
I'm capable of just putting my butt in a chair and spending nine hours a day studying poker. I took it as a full time job. So I think that it's a combination of being lucky, but also really studying, working hard and pushing myself to do everything I could.
We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.
If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won't know how resilient you are. It's only when you're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?
Stories are one of the most powerful forces of persuasion available to us, especially stories that fit in with our view of what the world should be like. Facts can be contested. Stories are far trickier. I can dismiss someone's logic, but dismissing how I feel is harder.
All too often, when it comes to our own minds, we are surprisingly mindless. We sail on, blithely unaware of how much we are missing, of how little we grasp of our own thought process - and how much better we could be if only we'd taken the time to understand and to reflect.