Jeffrey

“As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive effect", then on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first. How good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread those small effects across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news. The same is property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period, rather than have it spread out over a long time.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“You know, if you're an American and you're born at this time in history especially, you're lucky. We all are. We won the world history Powerball lottery.”
― Bill Maher

“As we’ve gone along, I’ve pointed out that a warm childhood relationship with his mother—not maternal education—was significantly related to a man’s verbal test scores, to high salary, to class rank at Harvard, and to military rank at the end of World War II. At the men’s twenty-fifth reunion, it looked, to my surprise, as though the quality of a man’s relationship with his mother had little effect on overall midlife adjustment. However, forty-five years later, to my surprise again, the data suggested that there was a significant positive correlation between the quality of one’s maternal relationship and the absence of cognitive decline. At age ninety, 33 percent of the men with poor maternal relationships, and only 13 percent of men with warm relationships, suffered from dementia.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb