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.

We have associations to things. We have, you know, we have associations to tables and to - and to dogs and to cats and to Harvard professors, and that's the way the mind works. It's an association machine.

The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the [investment management] industry.

Many people will admit that they made a mistake [putting money in dot-coms or telecoms at their peak] But that doesn’t mean that they’ve changed their mind about anything in particular. It doesn’t mean that they are now able to avoid that mistake.

I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.

Some memories come with a very compelling sense of truth about them. And that happens to be the case even with memories that are not true.

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.