Familiarity can provide the misguided illusion of understanding. Assume nothing.

While you judge me by my outward appearance I am silently doing the same to you, even though there’s a ninety-percent chance that in both cases our assumptions are wrong.

Perhaps, if you weren’t so busy regarding my shortcomings, you’d find that I do possess redeeming qualities, discreet as they may be. I notice when the sky is blue. I smile down at children. I laugh at any innocent attempt at humor. I quietly carry the burdens of others as though they were my own....

When dealing with critics always remember this: Critics judge things based on what is outside of their content of understanding.

Oh, yes.” There was no shame in it. Sometimes there wasn’t time to do anything else but take a flying leap. Sometimes you had to trust to experience and intuition and general awareness and take a running jump. Nanny herself could clear quite a tall conclusion from a standing start.

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.

We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of...

You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

Culture is the sum of the values, beliefs and assumptions of human groups.

Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French and Indian war he had been more outspoken, but he learned from experience to allow his sheer presence to speak for itself.)...

Every rock-thrower needs something to stand on to have any accuracy or do any damage with the rocks.

You figured that the only way I’d be happy is if I did the things you thought would be best for me.

As the unexpected becomes ordinary, the spotlight shifts once again to land where your brain thinks it will get more informational bang for the attentional buck.

An assumption is the joke; truth the punchline.

The strength of one’s opinion should not exceed their knowledge on the matter.

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity...

It is so easy at times for a lonely individual to begin fantasizing about what the people outside are saying about him and, in result, irrationally and fearfully, and sometimes angrily, fancy himself a villain.

We all make assumptionsevery day. Some more important than others. Some more damagingthan others. And things, very often, are not at all what they seem.

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military – or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway – in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie...

A favor is a friendly, gracious, kind, generous or obliging act that is freely granted. It is offered and not solicited.A promise is a declaration assuring that one will or will not do something. It is a vow to commit oneself by a promise to do or give. It is a pledge: to make a...

Lahat ng mga salitang yan may dating sa’yo. Sabi kasi ng isip mo.

Sometimes a person’s first assumption was very telling. It revealed how they perceived the situation.

I had people saying ‘it’s all in your head’. Do you honestly think I want to feel this way?

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.

They have the unique ability to listen to one story and understand another.

… always keep in mind that an article of faith is not something that the faithful assume. Faith, for those who have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion.

There is no growth in assuming. For it does not give, it takes away.

Over time, I discovered that learning new things doesn’t always liberate you. Instead it makes you wonder if your pants are on backward or if the trees are holding the sky up – it makes you question all of your assumptions and conventions.

People in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say,’Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’Or they can be in negative sentiment override, said that even a relatively new tool...

Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.

One’s opinion should only be as strong as one’s knowledge on the matter.

Pride is a fallacy. None of us are greater than the sum of our parts.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

Learning to be aware of what you unconsciously know may depend on a line of focused effort and specialized knowledge and even some measure of aptitude, but actually learning it may be effortless, automatic, and require very little of what we normally think of as intelligence.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: “It won’t work. You can’t cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary’s clerk.

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously...

Never judge a woman by her age.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Assumptions are unopened windows that foolish birds fly into, and their broken bodies are evidence gathered too late.

Is there wisdom in innocence? I think there is, but there is a cult now of drab men and women, for whom the world, and even life itself, is a kind of commodity. These critics, having eaten, now study their excrement to see what they consumed. On this they base certain conclusions. Their ignorance is...

A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.

My point is this — you don’t know. When I was first here, people looked at my hair, noticed apples on my tray, and thought ‘hippie.’ Then, from ‘hippie’ they thought ‘druggie.’ From there it went to ‘will get me in trouble’ and ‘not worth my time,’ and then they stopped thinking at all. No...

Life is a series of events and sensations. Everything else is interpretation. Much is lost in transition – and added in assumption / projection

Just because I am queer doesn’t mean I am queer for you

Character displays “the weighty impatience of having to explain something that should already be understood.

Don’t build roadblocks out of assumptions.

The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and...

Conventional wisdom won’t provide continual growth.