Kevin Kelly Quotes

I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us.

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.

The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies.

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

When a man hears himself somewhat misrepresented, it provokes him—at least, I find it so with myself; but when misrepresentation becomes very gross and palpable, it is more apt to amuse him.

What I find funny are peoples' blind spots. That's the funniest thing about anybody - when they just don't realize who they are. What's funny about seeing a hippo do ballet is it thinks it's a swan.

We're not really allowed to admit that, maybe as humans, sometimes we need to revise our own histories and frame things in a more positive light than is true.

When people don't understand what they're watching, a lot of what they perceive has to do with who they themselves are.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

You cannot question an assumption you do not know you have made.

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.

Assumptions are what we don't know we are making

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know. One often obtains a clue to a person's nature by discovering the reasons for his or her imperviousness to certain impressions.

It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having.

I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don't know why I do things.

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

How baffling it was that even the most cunning and clever people would frequently see only what they wanted to see, and would rarely look beyond the thinnest of facades. Or they would ignore reality, dismissing it as the facade. And then, when their whole world fell to pieces...they would tear their topknots or rend their clothes and bewail their karma, blaming gods or kami or luck or their lords or husbands or vassals-anything or anyone-but never themselves.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.

We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves.