11 Quotes by Walter Mischel

And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.

Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.

I think the whole point about self-control, the whole point about willpower, is to help people understand that there are endless self-nudge techniques that can be enormously helpful and are very simple.

I have an easy tendency to stumble and fall, which is not a good thing in an 84-year-old guy, so when I brush my teeth, then I do balancing exercises.

The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us.

This is encouraging evidence of the power of the environment to influence characteristics like intelligence. Even if traits like intelligence have large genetic determinants, they are still substantially malleable.

I made a pact with my three-year-old thumb-sucking daughter that if she stopped sucking her thumb, I would stop sucking my pipe.

Melancholy is not one of my emotions. Quite seriously, I don’t do melancholy. It’s a miserable way to be.

In fact, Bill Clinton’s an excellent example of what he should be doing when he realizes that he’s not invulnerable. He realized two things: his invulnerability was contextualized in two things: junk food, and he had a problem with certain kinds of women.