785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

Achievement is talent plus preparation.

We would all be sitting in our deck chairs in the backyard, and we would look up, and all of a sudden, the Air House – or maybe even some specific part of the Air House – would be gone. Poof. High-altitude precision bombing. Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.

The difference isn’t resources, it’s attitude.

To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade... It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head – even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’re really like to be.

If you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.

Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn’t happen.

We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t.

Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.