The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don't decide to do it. We don't control it.

By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

If the pull of the moon can disturb the ocean, why can’t the pull of planets cause a disturbance in the mind of creatures like us.

One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.

I guess we’re all guilty at some point of failing to appreciate the small things, because when we use a broad brush to paint our exemplary lives, we splatter ourselves with ignorance.

Women forget all the things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget.

Enthusiasm is something so positive.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

When your mind opens, the whole world falls into place.

Life must be lived with courage, with climbing and risks, else there is no happiness, no hope, no true success, no future.

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

The fire inside people is like a match; the way to ignite that flame is initially through friction, then other matches are lit through warmth.