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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 05381bd | Take out a piece of paper and get ready to write. Really do it; it will be fun. OK. Now, read the following list of words out loud one time, and then try to write as many of them as you can remember on the paper without looking back. When you think you have them all down on paper, come back to the book. Go: door, glass, pane, shade, ledge, sill, house, open, curtain, frame, view, breeze, sash, screen, shutter Now, take a look at the list. H.. | David McRaney | ||
| c735664 | People who take credit for the times when things go their way but who put the blame on others when they stumble or fall are generally happier people. | David McRaney | ||
| afd7c68 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You know how your opinions have changed over time. THE TRUTH: Unless you consciously keep tabs on your progress, you assume the way you feel now is the way you have always felt. | David McRaney | ||
| bd51c9d | THE MISCONCEPTION: We could create a system with no regulations where everyone would contribute to the good of society, everyone would benefit, and everyone would be happy. THE TRUTH: Without some form of regulation, slackers and cheaters will crash economic systems because people don't want to feel like suckers. | David McRaney | ||
| 747f138 | THE MISCONCEPTION: You choose to accept or refuse an offer based on logic. THE TRUTH: When it comes to making a deal, you base your decision on your status. | David McRaney | ||
| 221c05a | A roundworm has about three hundred neurons. A cat has about a billion, and you have about eighty-five billion. | David McRaney | ||
| 0f78258 | you are the same as an insect, just with a more complex nervous system responding to stimuli with a wider array of denser behavioral routines that only appear to give rise to consciousness. | David McRaney | ||
| 55ef7f5 | The researchers discovered that money is indeed a major factor in day-to-day happiness. No surprise there. You need to make a certain amount, on average, to be able to afford food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and the occasional Apple product, but what spun top hats around the country was their finding that, beyond a certain point, your happiness levels off. The happiness that money offers doesn't keep getting more and more potent--it .. | David McRaney | ||
| d70f16c | One of the stranger facets of consistency bias is how it can be evoked on the spot. If you are primed to believe you are an honest person, you will then act as if you are. | David McRaney | ||
| d4e4149 | Research by psychologist Steven Sloman and marketing expert Phil Fernbach shows that people who claim to understand complicated political topics such as cap and trade and flat taxes tend to reveal their ignorance when asked to provide a detailed explanation without the aid of Google. Though people on either side of an issue may believe they know their opponents' positions, when put to the task of breaking it down they soon learn that they h.. | David McRaney | ||
| 2fb7a0d | To be less dumb, remember your propensity for post hoc postulation and the power positive permutations of the placebo effect have to pollute your perspicacity. | David McRaney | ||
| fed3171 | One of the greatest discoveries in recent years was to find that mirror neurons fire also when you do things. It is as if part of your brain is observing yourself as an outsider. You are a story you tell yourself. | David McRaney | ||
| d31fdcc | As you just read that list, maybe you said to yourself, "No, I don't think I'm better than everyone." So you think you're more honest with yourself than the average person? You are not so smart.) No one, it seems, believes he or she is part of the population" | David McRaney | ||
| c151a3f | An entire tree swept past the door, upside down, its roots sprouting upward like horns. "You see that?" "Yeah. It's gonna wake up in the middle of the ocean, say, 'Wait a second. This isn't right.' "'I'm supposed to be over there.' "'Took me years to get that hill looking the way I wanted it." | Dennis Lehane | ||
| 430591e | Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed. | John le Carré | ||
| fd81432 | Don't forget--Charlie Chaplin too, my friend." "I'd do an imitation, but I don't know what he sounds like." "Hey, not bad, boss. You can open for me in the Catskills." | Dennis Lehane | ||
| c1e8688 | You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself. Each | John le Carré | ||
| 8731698 | We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: 'Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.'" After" -- | John le Carré | ||
| e442728 | They would expect him to be afraid; for his service pursued traitors as the eye of God followed Cain across the desert. | John le Carré | ||
| e81e2cc | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Theatrical Trailer (Courtesy of Focus | John le Carré | ||
| f6306ea | There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed. | england english englishmen | John le Carré | |
| 561821f | The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses. | John le Carré | ||
| afdadb7 | a night-time journey of the soul | John le Carré | ||
| af8a56b | We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible, of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really. I mean ... one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold | John le Carré | ||
| 7c87953 | Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that 'Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou'wester'. And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince. Was | John le Carré | ||
| 5125185 | Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping finger of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins; the goddess, the freedom, the lure.. | John le Carré | ||
| 8d600ed | I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. --W. H. AUDEN | John le Carré | ||
| 6f5862c | In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job. | spook-talk spook-truth spy-truth | John le Carré | |
| 0d6ce8e | A vida tem de ser paga. A vida e fazer-se o que tem de ser feito, mesmo que se morra por causa disso. | John le Carré | ||
| dbbe985 | You killed a sentry, you know that?" "I guessed I had...What do they expect if they mount such a damn stupid operation? Why didn't they pull us both in at once? Why put all the lights out? If anything was over organized, that was." "I am afraid that as a nation we tend to over organize. Abroad that passes for efficiency." | John le Carré | ||
| 50d12ec | The fact you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing. | John le Carré | ||
| 7fdaed8 | he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion . . . . | John le Carré | ||
| 588b0d4 | They were ashamed of having pencils and paper. But it's no good just throwing them away, is it? That's what I learnt in the end. That's why I left the Party, I suppose." Smiley wanted to ask him how Fennan himself had felt, but Fennan was talking again. He had shared nothing with them, he had come to realize that. They were not men, but children, who dreamed of freedom-fires, gipsy music, and one world tomorrow, who rode on white horses acr.. | John le Carré | ||
| ab36fe0 | He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man. | John le Carré | ||
| b027dcf | It's an old illness you suffer from, Mr. Smiley," she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; "and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that's a terrible moment, isn't it? The names.. | John le Carré | ||
| 601f932 | Hotel's full up, I'm afraid, Mr. Roper, Jonathan rehearsed in another last-ditch effort to fend off the inevitable. Herr Meister is desolated. A temporary clerk has made an unpardonable error. However, we have managed to obtain rooms for you at the Baur au Lac, et cetera. | John le Carré | ||
| 30e14ea | We were wondering, you see,' he said in a faraway voice, 'whether you'd ever considered signing up with us on a more regular basis? People who have worked on the outside for us don't always fit well on the inside. But in your case, we think you might. We don't pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it's an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means. | John le Carré | ||
| 3bf7a10 | Austerity pleased her--it gave her the comfort of sacrifice. | John le Carré | ||
| 700446e | let us honour if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one. Or | John le Carré | ||
| 94b36da | The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of No Man's Land. I send you my greetings. -- the closing lines of Smiley's letter to Karla persuading him to defect. | John le Carré | ||
| 8ee51fe | The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story. --JOHN LE CARRE | Wendy Wax | ||
| f0c0f24 | Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it's about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young. | John le Carré | ||
| 18870aa | He hated to be alone, but people bored him. | John le Carré | ||
| 55238d8 | But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man's speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark. | John le Carré |