15 Quotes by Robert H. Frank

Life is graded on the curve. It’s not how big you are, how strong you are, how smart you are. It’s how good you are at the things that count relative to the people around you.

If the search is for examples that contradict the predictions of standard economic models, a good rule of thumb is to start in France.

Pass down values every day through your actions, your words and your time with your kids.

The most common mistake we make as teachers is attempting to tell our students too much.

Before Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren went into politics, she and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, coauthored a book in which they asked why most one-earner couples could live comfortably within their budgets in the 1950s, yet the two-earner couples that had become the norm by the 1990s often struggled to make ends meet.9 Their answer was that the second paycheck went largely to fuel a bidding war for houses in better school districts.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

In one large sample of women, for instance, the annual probability of divorce among those whose weddings cost more than $20,000 was more than three times that of those whose weddings cost between $5,000 and $10,000.

As Warren Buffett once said, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

In short both the things we feel we need and the things available for us to buy depend largely – beyond some point, almost entirely – on the things that others choose to buy.