Trang > Trang's Quotes

“Don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“Why is it so important to have fun? Because if you love your work (or your activism or your family time), then you’ll want to do more of it. You’ll think about it before you go to sleep and as soon as you wake up; your mind is always in gear. When you’re that engaged, you’ll run circles around other people even if they are more naturally talented. From what we’ve seen personally, the best predictor of success among young economists and journalists is whether they absolutely love what they do. If they approach their job like—well, a job—they aren’t likely to thrive. But if they’ve somehow convinced themselves that running regressions or interviewing strangers is the funnest thing in the world, you know they have a shot.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“When people don’t pay the true cost of something, they tend to consume it inefficiently.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“It has long been said that the three hardest words to say in the English language are I love you. We heartily disagree! For most people, it is much harder to say I don’t know.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“Ideas nearly always seem brilliant when they’re hatched, so we never act on a new idea for at least twenty-four hours.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others’. This doesn’t make them bad people; it just makes them human.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“While one might expect that suicide is highest among people whose lives are the hardest, research by Lester and others suggests the opposite: suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. “If you’re unhappy and you have something to blame your unhappiness on—if it’s the government, or the economy, or something—then that kind of immunizes you against committing suicide,” he says. “It’s when you have no external cause to blame for your unhappiness that suicide becomes more likely.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“If it takes a lot of courage to admit you don’t know all the answers, just imagine how hard it is to admit you don’t even know the right question.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“If you really want to persuade someone who doesn’t wish to be persuaded, you should tell him a story.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“Have fun, think small, don’t fear the obvious.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“The best way to increase wolves in America, rabbits in Australia, and snakes in India is to pay a bounty on their scalps. Then every patriot goes to raising them.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“Consider the kind of questions that kids ask. Sure, they may be silly or simplistic or out of bounds. But kids are also relentlessly curious and relatively unbiased. Because they know so little, they don’t carry around the preconceptions that often stop people from seeing things as they are. When it comes to solving problems, this is a big advantage.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“And then there’s the tale of an economist on holiday in Las Vegas. He found himself one night in a bar standing beside a gorgeous woman. “Would you be willing to sleep with me for $1 million?” he asked her. She looked him over. There wasn’t much to see—but still, $1 million! She agreed to go back to his room. “All right then, ” he said. “Would you be willing to sleep with me for $100?” “A hundred dollars!” she shot back. “What do you think I am, a prostitute?” “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just negotiating the price.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“It’s much better to ask small questions than big ones.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness. Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Any major illness transforms a patient’s—really, an entire family’s—life.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability--or your mother's--to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot in exchange for the small possibility of a fatal brain hemorrhage? Your right hand's function to stop seizures? How much neurological suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient, and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back. Therein lies his message.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including alas, the one that says entropy always increases. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I'm dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince