785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

A certain property fundamentalism, having no connection to our tradition, now reigns in this culture.

From experience, we gain a powerful gift, the ability to act instinctively, in the moment.

What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that’s the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.

Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.

Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

We are approaching levels – if we’re not beyond levels – of threshold for the number of messages that consumers can take in in a given day. There is a kind of hunger for some kind of new approach to getting the word out about something.

They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn’t starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn’t have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers interested in their paintings.

The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.

I’m necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. But I’m still a parasite.