16 Quotes by Will Storr

I was aware and increasingly suspicious of the separation between the things i felt and the voice that interpreted those feelings. We really are, as people sometimes glibly say, a mystery to ourselves.we really are

... and a motto in a frame: sometimes i feel like giving up but then i remember of a lot of motherfuckers to prove wrong

The gift of story is wisdom

Locked inside the black vault of our skulls, stuck forever in the solitude of our own hallucinated universe, story is a portal, a hallucination within the hallucination, the closest we'll ever really come to escape.

We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.

We are betrayed by our maps of salience. They plot our narratives, identify our enemies and then coat them in distorting layer of loathing and dread. We feel that hunch - withdraw - and then conduct a post factum search for evidence that justifies it. We are motivated to fight our foes because we are emotional about them, but emotion is the territorial scent-mark of irrationality.

Exposure to a mixed body of evidence made both sides even more convinced of the fundamental soundness of their original beliefs.' Confirmation bias is profoundly human and it is appalling. When new information leads to an increase in ignorance, it is the opposite of learning, the death of wisdom.

Plato believed in metaphorical realm of pure form.. Aristotle, his pupil, rejected this, insisting that the only reality is that which we consent. We live in the world of things, he thought and each of those things have unique properties that can be defined and categorized and acts predictably according to certain laws.

... for now though our investigation into how future enters and then changes us must return to the idea of the self as a storyteller. In doing so we will realize just how porous the boundary is really is between the stories that surround us and the story that is us.