Kathryn Schulz

“The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.”

“knowledge is conventionally viewed as belief plus a bunch of credentials”

“I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.”

“Doubt is the act of challenging our beliefs. . . . This is an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn't divide the mind so much as multiply it, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds and the entire Bronx Zoo. This is the doubt we stand to sacrifice if we can't embrace error—the doubt of curiosity, possibility, and wonder.”

“As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.”

“First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?”

“The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number.”

“If it is sweet to be right, then - let's not deny it - it is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong.”

“Reliance on other people's knowledge. . . . buys us all a lot of time. It also buys us, in essence, many billions of prosthetic brains.”

“We're terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don't know.”

“The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”

“If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people’s stories—which is to say, other people—cease to matter to us.”

“Parading our own brilliance and exulting in other people's errors is not very nice. For that matter, even wanting to parade our own brilliance and exult in other people's errors is not very nice, although it is certainly very human.”

“The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can't go forth and drag an actual chunk if the world back to their internal lair, intact and as is, for the benefit of the rest if the brain.”

“Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong”

“The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can't go forth and drag an actual chunk of the world back to their internal lair, intact and as is, for the benefit of the rest of the brain.”

“The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.”

“Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.”

“To err is to wander and wandering is the way we discover the world and lost in thought it is the also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying but in the end it is static a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling and sometimes even dangerous but in the end it is a journey and a story. Who really wants to stay at home and be right when you can don your armor spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world True you might get lost along get stranded in a swamp have a scare at the edge of a cliff thieves might steal your gold brigands might imprison you in a cave sorcerers might turn you into a toad but what of what To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in the spirit that this book is written.”

“If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy.”