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.

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.

We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesen't remind us what we did badly, it reminds us what we know we could do better.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

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

I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.

Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?