Paula Pell Quotes

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.

Pray look better, Sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

Appearances frequently deceive us, and what at first sight carries with it the face of good proves to be a real evil, whilst an apparent evil oftentimes conceals an extraordinary good

I think people have a warped sense of who I am.

Fame is a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

It's so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we're wrong, and often we're dead wrong, we miss the truth.

It's what a fellow thinks he knows that hurts him.

I'm surprised sometimes at how some of my actions are misinterpreted.

I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

People can misconstrue closeness for love.

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.

If you hear the question wrong, you will answer wrong.

But what if our intelligence is wrong?

It is the habit of mankind to mistake familiarity for accurate knowledge.

Belief and seeing: They are both often wrong.

Amusingly, Christopher Columbus totally bungled ... by relying on subsequent less-accurate calculations and confusing Arabic miles with Italian miles, concluding that he needed to sail only 3,700 km to reach the Orient when the true value was 19,600 km. He clearly wouldn’t have gotten his trip funded if he’d done his math right, and he clearly wouldn’t have survived if America hadn’t existed, so sometimes being lucky is more important than being right.

A lot of things get misinterpreted with me, I guess.

Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong.

I think the most fundamental error we make is mistaking a noisy, anomalous event for the norm. This happens all the time - in the stock market, in reports of crime and natural disaster, etc. The fact is that big, noisy, anomalous events catch our attention because they're anomalous, which isn't a problem in and of itself.