“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”

“. . . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.”

“As a matter of fact, your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive effect", then on their intensity when they hit. In other words, good news is good news first. How good matters rather little. So to have a pleasant life you should spread those small effects across time as evenly as possible. Plenty of mildly good news is preferable to one single lump of great news. The same is property in reverse applies to our unhappiness. It is better to lump all your pain into a brief period, rather than have it spread out over a long time.”

“The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results, and one's role in them.”

“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”

“To bankrupt a fool, give him information.”

“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”