David > David's Quotes

“The retail industry has its own headache: it loses $16 billion a year to customers who buy clothes, wear them with the tags tucked in, and return these secondhand clothes for a full refund.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“every year, employees’ theft and fraud at the workplace are estimated at about $600 billion.”
― Dan Ariely, The Irrational Bundle: Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

“Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren't doing so well in class are at even higher risk - students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students. In a paper exploring this sad connection, Adam speculates that the phenomenon is due to intrafamilial dynamics, which is to say, students' grandmothers care so much about their grandchildren that they worry themselves to death over the outcome of exams.”
― Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves

“...if I pay you lots of money to see reality in a certain way, you will.”
― Dan Ariely

“[..] we human beings are ready and willing to steal something that does not explicitly reference monetary value - that is, something that lacks the face of a dead president.”
― Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves

“One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne”
― Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

“Maybe we feel meaning only when we deal with something bigger. Perhaps we hope that someone else, especially someone important to us, will ascribe value to what we've produced? Maybe we need the illusion that our work might one day matter to many people. That it might be of some value in the big, broad world out there [...]? Most likely it is all of these. But fundamentally, I think that almost any aspect of meaning [...] can be sufficient to drive our behaviour. As long as we are doing something that is somewhat connected to our self image, it can fuel our motivation and get us to work much harder.”
― Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves

“We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.”
― Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves

“To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance.”
― Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

“individuals are honest only to the extent that suits them (including their desire to please others)”
― Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

“But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?”
― Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..”
― Pablo Casals

“Each second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that will never be again And what do we teach our children? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michaelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.”
― Pablo Casals

“To the whole world you might be just one person, but to one person you might just be the whole world.”
― Pablo Casals

“To live is not enough; we must take part.”
― Pablo Casals

“The CHILD must know that he is a MIRACLE, that since the beginning of the world there hasn’t been, and until the end of the world will not be, another child like him.”
― Pablo Casals

“Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood.”
― Pablo Casals

“I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.”
― Pablo Casals

“The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all. ”
― Pablo Casals

“The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? ”
― Pablo Casals

“In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness... I see what people call God in all these things.”
― Pablo Casals

“I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.”
― Pablo Casals

“How could anybody think of Bach as 'cold' when these [cello] suites seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry," Casals said. "As I got on with the study I discovered a new world of space and beauty... the feelings I experienced were among the purest and most intense in my artistic life!”
― Pablo Casals according to Eric Siblin, The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece

“They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.”
― Ernest Hemingway