Nothing is as dangerous as a sure thing.
Interpretation
Certainty can lead to complacency and danger.
This quote by Stanley Kubrick warns that absolute certainty can make individuals or groups overlook potential risks and uncertainties, leading them to make poor decisions. The 'sure thing' can create a false sense of security that blinds people to the dangers that lie ahead, implying that itβs important to remain cautious and vigilant, even when circumstances seem guaranteed.
In practice
In a motivational speech discussing the importance of caution in business predictions.
The reality of the final moment, just before shooting [the scene], is so powerful that all previous analysis must yield before the impressions you receive under these circumstances, and unless you use this feedback to your positive advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to it and accept the sometimes terrifying weaknesses it can expose, you can never realize the most out of your film.
Because I direct films, I have to live in a major English-speaking production center. That narrows it down to three places: Los Angeles, New York and London. I like New York, but it's inferior to London as a production center. Hollywood is best, but I don't like living there.
I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.
A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
Whatever someone did to you in the past has no power over the present. Only you give it power.
The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive.
Loving kindness towards ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. It means we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
I wrote a great deal... but very little of any importance; there are not more than four of five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.
Endlessly amused by people's minds.
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