Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period.

The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.

We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

Many ideas happen to us. We have intuition, we have feeling, we have emotion, all of that happens, we don't decide to do it. We don't control it.

By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

We're generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments.

Your relationship or marriage is dead or dying, if you almost always have to remind your partner to miss you (and/or they almost always have to remind you to miss them).

What do the words “plant” and “plan” have in common? Yes, correct, it’s the word PLAN. Mind Gardening is a mindful thinking and planning philosophy.

This never gets old, and when it does, I'll go do a movie. I like the fact that I can get into other projects because everything feels fresh when I come back to music.

It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.

Theres monsters in all of us, but theres also vulnerability.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

Look, America was a narrowly divided country in 2000;49-49 was what Michael Barone called it. It's a 49-49 nation.

She wants you to be a god," I told him. "I know." His face twisted with embarrassment, and in spite of itself my heart lightened. It was such a boyish response. And so human. Parents, everywhere.

I think that sexiness should be in the subtleties.

I felt better being in the background. That's the way I like it.