What I Don't Know Matters Enormously
"It’s a very difficult principle to grasp, this idea that actually, what I don’t know matters enormously, and what I can’t see matters enormously."
~ Daniel Kahneman
In a Different Language
"What we’ve been doing for thousands of years is just trying to piece by piece get some understanding of where we came from, where the universe came from, and where it’s all going. So, to me, that is not distinct from what the poet does or what the philosopher does or what the great writer does or the composer does. They just do it in a different language."
~ Brian Greene
Maybe This Brain Can Be Reset
"I do know enough as a psychologist about learning and memory. And I know that we learn. How much of this I need to do in order to change, I cannot say. But I can say that there is a point at which this brain is not just elastic in moving to what is being suggested, but that it may be plastic in that it can be reset into a new mold."
~ Mahzarin Banaji
The Essence of Complementarity
"I believe that it’s really interesting and really fun and really informative, and the right thing to do to be able to look at things in different ways, and appreciate there are different ways of looking at things that each have their own validity."
~ Frank Wilczek
A Stillness of Voice and Body
"This is something you do find in Quaker meetings, actually, and in Buddhist meetings as well. The whole herd, and that may be 50 animals, will suddenly be still, completely still. And it's not just a stillness of voice, it's a stillness of body."
~ Katy Payne
How Can We Live Together?
"What we need to learn is how can we live together with people whose views we don't actually like very much? That's the far greater challenge, without attempting to convert them or dismissing them and denying their right to exist parallel to us. It's really about the stranger...It's basically saying we have a shared humanity even with people who don't seem to take the boxes that we have put in place in terms of recognizing what a good human is."
~ Alain de Botton
Looking for Meaning in Objects
"As I became a sociologist, [I discovered] there's a fancy word for studying this; it's called bricolage. It's the science of studying meanings and the interplay of objects, and I realized that that's kind of what I'd been doing all the time. A little bit like Molière's, Monsieur Jourdain who'd been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, I'd been a bricoleur all my life without knowing it."
~ Sherry Turkle