Robert Sapolsky Quotes

I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

I don't particularly like messages, because everybody takes whatever they take from whatever.

That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential, at least as long as they have something else in theirs.

That was the thing about pictures--they were worth a thousand words, but sometimes they weren't the right ones.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

In the absence of feedback, people will fill in the blanks with a negative. They will assume you don’t care about them or don’t like them.

Only when you understand people, they may understand you. So even though you do not say anything, if you understand people there is some communication.

The most important thing is presentation.

A stated truth loses its grace, but a repeated error appears insipid and ridiculous.

Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so-why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?

I want to explain everything to him, show him that it’s really not as screwed up as it all sounds, but then I remember that it is.

Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking.

You're always fighting the contradiction between the supposed intimacy of a two-person conversation and the blunt reality that you're trying to sell the play to people who are sitting maybe too far away from you.

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.

Style tells you a lot more about the truth than substance, because it comes at the truth in an oblique way, it comes in on a slant, it doesn't tell you what it is. It's unexpected and it makes you laugh and think.

How you speak about others speaks loudest about yourself.

You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.

The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor.

I never gossip. I observe. And then relay my observations to practically everyone.

We just do not see how very specialized the use of "I know" is.

One of my missions is to get people to go, "Oh, she's really nice and I really like her, but what were the words she just said?!" I want your instincts to be at odds with your mind.