Cory Lemay > Cory's Quotes

“If there's something you really want to believe, that's what you should question the most.”
― Penn Jillette

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
― Carl Sagan

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.”
― Bill Nye

“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”
― Michael Shermer

“Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”
― Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

“[T]he nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“People who are skilled at dialogue do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool--even ideas that at first glance appear controversial, wrong, or at odds with their own beliefs. Now, obviously they don't agree with every idea; they simply do their best to ensure that all ideas find their way into the open.”
― Kerry Patterson, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

“At the core of every successful conversation lies the free flow of relevant information.”
― Kerry Patterson, Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High

“Parents think they can hand children permanent confidence—like a gift—by praising their brains and talent. It doesn’t work, and in fact has the opposite effect. It makes children doubt themselves as soon as anything is hard or anything goes wrong. If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.”
― Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential

“This is one of the marks of a truly safe person: they are confrontable.”
― Henry Cloud, Safe People: How to Find Relationships That Are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren't

“Writing is thinking on paper”
― William Zinsser

“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.”
― William Knowlton Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information”
― Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

“[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.”
― Elizabeth Loftus

“Finally brothers and sisters; whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.”
― Paulo Coelho

“If you are willing to do only what’s easy, life will be hard. But if you are willing to do what’s hard, life will be easy.”
― T. Harv Eker