If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy.

Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

Thirty-three percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education.

Parading our own brilliance and exulting in other people's errors is not very nice. For that matter, even wanting to parade our own brilliance and exult in other people's errors is not very nice, although it is certainly very human.

I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.

Unlike earlier thinkers, who had sought to improve their accuracy by getting rid of error, Laplace realized that you should try to get more error: aggregate enough flawed data, and you get a glimpse of the truth. "The genius of statistics, as Laplace defined it, was that it did not ignore errors; it quantified them," the writer Louis Menand observed. "...The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes.