Admiration is seen as a noble sentiment – we admire people for admiring others, detecting, in their admiration, a suggestion of taste and humility. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
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. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
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. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
The fact that insomnia is associated with depression suggests that sleep might help us deal with emotionally stressful or otherwise disruptive events. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
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. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
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. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
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. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
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. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
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. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
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. Maria Konnikova Read Quote
