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What market researchers often underestimate… is the degree to which consumers are myopic and have difficulty imagining or anticipating a new and very different reality.

The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.

…the feeling of control – whether real or illusory – is one of the wellsprings of mental health.

In order to maintain the delicate balance between reality and illusion, we seek positive views of our experience, but we only allow ourselves to embrace those views when they seem credible.

…attention’s selective nature guarantees that even in a close relationship, two partners often focus on different realities.

Much research incontrovertibly shows that memory is biased and unpredictable – more like a patchwork quilt than the seamless tapestry of reality we like to imagine.

…acquiescence to a single way of understanding something means that you stop attending to reality, go on autopilot, and squelch any fresh ideas about how to do things better, or at least in your own way.

…our customary focus on things temporal and material is the major cause of human misery, because it distracts us from attending to timeless, formless true reality.

…the awareness of true reality is an experience, not an idea, that in fact requires a ‘radical refusal of thoughts’ in favor of a simple state of attending to the moment.

Abstractions that we unwittingly treat as physical reality tend to block us from seeing the way things are, and therefore reduce our power to accomplish what we say we want.