Robert Sapolsky Quotes

Often I think of personal behavior and judgment errors as being superficial wounds.

I find it valuable to watch what I do. I like to know when I'm making a choice if it actually works or not.

Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel.

I've never acted fully impulsively. I think with my mind and my heart.

I don't know how you can understand other people or yourself if you haven't read a lot of books. I just don't think you're equipped to deal with the demands and decisions of life, particularly in your dealings with other people.

I don't read reviews and I don't know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.

I want to take the time to think through how I feel and why I feel. I don't want to feign expertise on matters I know nothing about for the purpose of offering someone else my immediate reaction for their consumption.

People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can't do.

Most of the time, I see what I see, I search my feelings, and then I make my decisions based on my gut - and I don't always make the right ones.

My experience is listen, see, feel - and then think about what you change.

I'm not the type of person who feels bad about things before. I choose what to do at the moment, and I have a very good reason for it; otherwise, I don't do it. If later my feelings change, I should celebrate now by being more wise, not feel bad about before.

I still think carefully about what I'm going to say. I use me heart and head technique, in which the heart says, 'get stuck in, Dennis!', and the head says, 'just a minute... ' But I probably don't use this as often as some others.

It's very personal to me and doesn't work for everybody, but what I have found in my experience is that when I make pro and con lists, it's usually because I am trying to talk myself out of a good idea or talk myself into a really bad one.

Failure comes from ego, greed, envy, fear, imitation. I have success not because I am smart, but because I am rational.

My biggest past mistakes have been when I made decisions out of ego rather than spirit. When I acted too quickly. When I wasn't contemplative or reflective or prayerful enough, and I ended up making what I would only later see to be unwise decisions.

Education best serves students by helping them be more self-reflective.

I know I should just leave. Just go. Because there's a point where a mistake turns into a big mistake, and I should probably come to my senses before I get there.

Develop your reflective will and gain better insight before you say or do something.

Get to know yourself. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see. Know also when you actually have thought through to the nature of the thing with which you are dealing and when you are not thinking at all... Knowing yourself and knowing the facts, you can judge whether you can change the situation so it is more to your liking. If you cannot--or if you do not know how to improve on things--then discipline yourself to the adjustments that will be necessary.

It is a poor head that cannot find plausible reason for doing what the heart wants to do.

… temperament is your basic orientation toward life. The Elizabethans boiled it down to four types: You were choleric or sanguine or melancholy or aggressive. You can be a good leader from any of them. Lincoln was melancholy, but what a president! It’s more to do with how you grow, how you learn from your mistakes.

Not all those who know their minds know their hearts as well.

At the end of the day, none of us are the Oracle of Delphi, so we don't get everything right. It's always good to be able to listen and to take on what seems to be the right thing to do.

With experience, you understand expectations, you understand consequences, but sometimes it gets a little bit hard, especially for me, that I'm a perfectionist - I want to analyse everything. And sometimes it's most important to just let go and trust your instincts. This is what I need to do more of.

We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay - and rise!