Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

You should expect little or nothing from Wall Street stock pickers who hope to be more accurate than the market in predicting the future of prices. And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts.

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

you know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.