Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

We are tyrannized by our options.

I wish I had coined the phrase 'tyranny of choice,' but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.

There is simply too much to think about.

Employees speak of being fearful opening emails and feeling increasingly helpless in the face of the deluge. Physiologically, we now know that the state of continuous disruption puts us into a constant state of hormone-induced stress.

People aren't able to make decisions anymore because there's too many choices within that decision.

The web and physical world is plagued with abundance - people need help sorting through all the good and bad stuff out there. The tyranny of choice is causing major psychic pain and frustration for people.

When there's so much choice, it can get overwhelming and it's hard to make a choice.

When people have too many choices, they make bad choices.

Unlimited choice is paralyzing. The Internet has made this form of paralysis due to option overload a standard feature of comfortable modern life.

Once again I stopped listening to the news this week.

There's nothing scarier than unlimited choices.

Order and disorder, form and formless must have profound psychological roots, nervous roots.

We live in a culture where we're bombarded with so much noise and so much insecurity.

Technology is just so fast. As convenient as it is, it's stressing a lot of us out. It's just too much, too quick. And I'm interested in that conversation.

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

I'm on a lot of airplanes. There are definitely times when I just vapor-lock. I'm on the plane, and I have so much to do, I just don't know what to do. It never lasts for very long. It might last for the flight.

I'm the type of guy where, if I see, like, 20 songs, I don't even wanna listen to one of 'em 'cause it's too much.

There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible.

We're making more and more decisions every day. I think a lot of us feel overloaded by the process.

When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff.

Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm that a most miserable distraction of choice must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are in fact very prevalent, and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous 'gluttonism' for books.

Overload 'em with information an' they'll kill yeh jus' to simplify things.

And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is, you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving 'cause you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say, oh, look, a cow? Nobody.

We began to look at "Why is that?" And a large part of that has to do with the fact that when people have a lot of options to choose from they don't know how to tell them apart. They don't know how to keep track of them.

For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.