Leonard Mlodinow Quotes

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

One goes on with the blithe belief that who you really are is transparent to everybody. Then you realise, with some horror, that in fact it's not. So all you can do is keep muddying the waters a bit.

Three-fourths of the mistakes a man makes are made because he does not really know what he thinks he knows.

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

The things that we want we willingly believe, and the things that we think we expect everyone else to think.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself

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

For each believes his glimm'ering lamp to be the gorgeous light of day.

What people believe prevails over the truth.

Don't lose who you are in the blur of the stars Seeing is deceiving, dreaming is believing

Very few people love others for what they are; rather, they love what they lend them, their own selves, their own idea of them.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

We believe we're seeing the world just fine until it's called to our attention that we're not.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

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.

I'm not who you think i am. If you love me, you love me for the wrong reasons.

Believing is such a comfort that it's hard to give up a belief just because it isn't true.

Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge." -Elinor Dashwood

Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.

The real problem has to do with the inability by people to admit that a position they've held a long time might be wrong. That's all. Not that it is. Just that it might be. I don't know why it is, but we tend to fall in love with things we believe, Threaten them, and you threaten us.

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

We see what we want to believe.