Organizations may be better able to tame optimism than individuals are.

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.

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

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period.

The brains of humans contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news.