But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one o...
But let's not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader and that means you've probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get aroun...
As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends...
A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.
Think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greec...
The logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point,
The Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.
Innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, agreeableness, they tend to be on...
[Chris Langan] told me not long ago. I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in t...
You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students.
Words belong to the person who wrote them
Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.
When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning?
We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.
We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes.
Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.
The culture of honor hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-gr...
That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.
Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking—It will make you wrinkled! It will make you impotent! It will make you dead!—is useless, Harris concludes. This is adult propaganda; these are adult...
Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people senders.