25 Quotes by Robert J. Waldinger

In medicine, we spend billions each year on doing and a fraction of that amount on listening and reflecting.

Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.

People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner, and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely.

Putting labels on entire groups of people makes things much simpler. If all New Yorkers are pushy, or all politicians are dishonest, we don't have to do the hard work of figuring out who's who.

Far from the stereotype that psychodynamic treatments are appropriate only for the 'worried well,' a growing body of evidence points to their efficacy in dealing with the most pressing mental health problems of our time.

Sibling relationships have been underemphasised in learning about child development.

Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get.

Our kind of research might be one of the first projects to go. Our work is not urgent; it's not the cure for cancer or Alzheimer's. But we have a way of understanding human life that you can't get anywhere else, and it lays the foundation for important, actionable things.

We make artificial divisions everywhere: Democrats and Republicans, black and white, millennials and baby boomers. Even those of us who are against building walls find ourselves pointing accusing fingers at those wall-builders.