Book Titles

…you may ultimately feel better when you are the victim of an insult than when you are a bystander to it.

…when our freedom to make up our minds – or to change our minds once we’ve made them up – is threatened, we experience a strong impulse to reassert it…

…studies show that the mere act of explaining an unpleasant event can help to defang it.

Explanation robs events of their emotional impact because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them.

The price we pay for our irrepressible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.

…practice and coaching are the two means by which we learn just about everything we know.

One of the benefits of being a social and linguistic animal is that we can capitalize on the experience of others rather than trying to figure everything out for ourselves.

…wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth.

…if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.