Baltasar Gracian Quotes

Nobody's easier to fool, than the person who is convinced that he is right.

Thinking you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone

There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

The greatest fool is he who thinks he is not one and all others are.

Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.

I.Q. deficiency. There are some people who are an order of fries short of a Happy Meal, and what is often a characteristic about every one of these people is that they don't know it. They have no idea how incompetent or stupid they are. It's the exact opposite. They have the loftiest, highest self-image.

The man who has everything figured out is probably a fool.

The habit of an opinion often leads to the complete conviction of its truth, it hides the weaker parts of it, and makes us incapable of accepting the proofs against it.

I spent a lot of time quasi-fascinated with characters who were super-dumb and super-cocky. I always liked that combination.

Most of us think that we are 'better than average' in most things. We are also 'miscalibrated,' meaning that our sense of the probability of events doesn't line up with reality. When we say we are sure about a certain fact, for example, we may well be right only half the time.

I've always been surprised at the number of people who think we've got it all figured out. It's incorrect, and it's a real problem.

The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you'll be.

People are never so near playing the fool as when they think themselves wise.

Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.

Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment - and lord knows I've created a good bit of it - I don't think I've created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.

How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety!

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

It's the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself.

Thinking you know something is a sure way to blind yourself.

Anyone who makes up their mind about an issue before they hear the issue is a fool.