785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.

There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There’s a reasonable shot that – because of his money – we will cure malaria.

We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.

Whenever we have something that we are good at – something we care about – that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.

There are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.

It’s a lot like what people do when they are in psychoanalysis: they spend years analyzing their unconscious with the help of a trained therapist until they begin to get a sense of how their mind works. Heylmun and Civille have done the same thing – only they haven’t psychoanalyzed their feelings; they’ve psychoanalyzed their feelings for mayonnaise and Oreo cookies.

The fatalism of Russian peasant proverbs is contrasted with the self-reliance of Chinese ones by.

Your unconscious, in the sense, was acting as a kind of mental valet. It was taking care of all the minor mental details in your life. It was keeping tabs on everything going on around you and making sure you were acting appropriately, while leaving you free to concentrate on the main problem at hand.