More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
today you’re going to interact with someone who seems like a jerk (as we all have been). The question is: Are you going to be ready for it?
eighteenth-century writer and witticist Nicolas Chamfort, who remarked that if you “swallow a toad every morning,” you’ll be fortified against anything else disgusting that might happen the rest of the day.
“No one can implicate me in ugliness—nor can I be angry at my relative or hate him.”
EXPECT TO CHANGE YOUR OPINIONS
“There are two things that must be rooted out in human beings—arrogant opinion and mistrust. Arrogant opinion expects that there is nothing further needed, and mistrust assumes that under the torrent of circumstance there can be no happiness.”
we must fight our biases and preconceptions: because they are a liability. Ask yourself: What haven’t I considered? Why is this thing the way it is? Am I part of the problem here or the solution? Could I be wrong here? Be doubly careful to honor what you do not know, and then set that against the knowledge you actually have.
we’re not as smart and as wise as we’d like to think we are. If we ever do want to become wise, it comes from the questioning and from humility—not, as many would like to think, from certainty, mistrust, and arrogance.
THE COST OF ACCEPTING COUNTERFEITS
how much effort we put into making sure money is real, whereas we accept potentially life-changing thoughts or assumptions without so much as a question.
One ironic assumption along these lines: that having a lot of money makes you wealthy.
