People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar
— Thich Nhat Hanh
People are motivated by both self-interest and a yearning desire to lead a morally meaningful life
— David Brooks
Little is needed to make a wise man happy, but nothing can content a fool. That is why nearly all men are miserable
People have a recency bias (that overweights fresh events), an anchoring bias (that overweights past events) and a loss aversion bias (that makes people fear loss more than they desire gain). These biases won’t go away. They’re the result of millions of years of evolution. But once you identify them, you can overcome them personally and factor them into forecasts of market behavior.
— Jim Rickards
Humans are natural-born magicians…
We create entire worlds through the stories we tell.
You could say humanity’s success is based on spinning useful fictions – telling stories about things that aren’t really there.
In his hit book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, author Yuval Noah Harari shows that the success of human societies and other organizations is based on things we made up out of thin air: gods, laws, money, nation-states…
We make up stories to explain the intangibles and bring meaning to our world. These stories give us purpose and unite us as a community.In Harari’s simple observation, you can see the roots of one of the great investment lessons of all time: Consumers don’t buy the products; they buy the stories those products tell and the feelings they elicit.”
Dan Ferris
A human being is a dark and veiled thing…and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is no longer outer shell. So said Nietzsche, and Freud agreed: we are ignorant of ourselves
— Daniel Kahneman