Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They're prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.
Richard WisemanRead
Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information. Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our beliefs actively shape our perception of the world rather than just reacting to new information.
This quote by Richard Wiseman emphasizes the dynamic role that beliefs play in our understanding of reality. Rather than merely receiving and processing information passively, our pre-existing beliefs actively influence how we interpret our experiences and the information we encounter, highlighting the powerful impact of our mental frameworks on our perception of the world.
Themes
BeliefsPerceptionRealityMindInformation
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about how people interpret news stories differently.
More from Richard Wiseman
All quotes →Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.
Richard WisemanRead
Similar quotes
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
Charles Horton CooleyRead
In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.
Gloria SteinemRead
There aren't just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It's our evolutionary history.
James LovelockRead
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
Cormac MccarthyRead
We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.
J. B. PriestleyRead
Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
Roberto BolanoRead