34 Quotes by Roy F. Baumeister

Self-awareness is a most peculiar trait among animals. Dogs will bark angrily at a mirror because they don’t realize they’re looking at themselves, and most other animals are similarly clueless when they’re subjected to a formal procedure called the mirror test.

The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.

Religion deals with the highest levels of meaning. As a result, it can interpret each life or each event in a context that runs from the beginning of time to future eternity. Religion is thus uniquely capable of offering high-level meaning to human life. Religionmay not always be the best way to make life meaningful, but it is probably the most reliable way.

Illusions, distortions, and self-deception appear to be integral to the way normal, well-adjusted people perceive the world. Seeing things as they really are is associated with depression and low self-esteem.

We’ve said that willpower is humans’ greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations. Save it for emergencies. As.

That’s the result of hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore temptations when they’re not immediately available, but once they’re right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals.

We can understand instrumental evil as the use of a particular set of means to pursue goals that, alternatively, might be pursued with acceptable means. The key question for understanding this form of evil then becomes: What makes people choose evil means rather than other, more acceptable ones?

First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three on down.

Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim.