Boris > Boris's Quotes

“As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situation.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“As students of the silver screen recall, Bogart's admonition about future regret led Bergman to board the plane and fly away with her husband. Had she stayed with Bogey in Casablanca, she would probably have felt just fine. Not right away, perhaps, but soon, and for the rest of her life.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“When a fruit salad, a lover, or a jazz trio is just too imperfect for our tastes, we stop eating, kissing, and listening. But the law of large numbers suggests that when a measurement is too imperfect for our tastes, we should not stop measuring. Quite the opposite - we should measure again and again until niggling imperfections yield to the onslaught of data.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavors, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“Space-time" - that hideous hybrid whose very hyphen looks phoney.”
― Nabokov Vladimir

“Life, Love, libraries, have no future”
― Nabokov Vladimir

“It was widely believed that a small, bald man in a grubby room in Moscow started all rumors to wreak havoc on our Western market-based economy.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street