73 Quotes by Kathryn Schulz

Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don’t get much airtime in day-to-day life. What’s the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we’re at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.

If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It’s called a lobotomy.

Parading our own brilliance and exulting in other people’s errors is not very nice. For that matter, even wanting to parade our own brilliance and exult in other people’s errors is not very nice, although it is certainly very human.

If it is sweet to be right, then – let’s not deny it – it is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong.

The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism – an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.

If you Google ‘regret and tattoo,’ you will get 11.5 million hits.

This suggests a curious paradox. If art arises from our fundamental isolation in our own minds – from the way we are denied direct access to the world and all its contents – it also temporarily frees us from that isolation. Art lets us live, for a little while, in other worlds, including in other people’s inner worlds; we can hear their thoughts, feel their emotions, even believe their beliefs.