“[W]e should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject.”

— Barry Schwartz , book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

The Paradox of Choice (2004)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 27, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "[W]e should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject." by Barry Schwartz?

Barry Schwartz 17

American psychologist 1946

Related quotes

“We don't attract what we like or despise, but we attract what we are constantly thinking about. If you are thinking about pain or happiness, then you should have your share of it.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“A large array of options may discourage customers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making the decision. ...[T]hinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one.”

Barry Schwartz book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

The Paradox of Choice (2004)

“The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather — not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i. e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Preface
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

“I could not imagine that we should make much of an effort to preserve remainders of natural beauty in conquered Poland.”

Fritz Todt (1891–1942) German engineer and senior Nazi figure

Quoted in "Technologies of Landscape: From Reaping to Recycling" - by David E. Nye - Nature - 2000 - Page 227.

“I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

“[W]e would probably claim Kafka as an Irish writer. His tone of voice is certainly quite Irish: that sense of melancholy, that sense of strangeness and of being a stranger in the world. I think that we empathise with that very much indeed.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

“Rather than reacting to every risk we hear and see, we should make an effort to discern which ones we can do something about.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 58

“[W]e live... in the pockets of reducibility. ...I should have realized [that] very many years ago, but didn't... [I]t could very well be that everything about the world is computationally irreducible and completely unpredictable, but... in our experience of the world there is at least some amount of prediction we can make. ...[T]hat's because we have ...chosen a slice of ...how to think about the universe, in which we can... sample a certain amount of computational reducibility, and that's... where we exist. ...It may not be the whole story about how the universe is, but it is that part of the universe that we care about and ...operate in. ...In science, that's been ...a very special case ...science has chosen to talk a lot about places where there is this computational reducibility... The motion of the planets can be ...predicted. The... weather is much harder to predict. ...[S]cience has tended to concentrate itself on places where its methods have allowed successful prediction.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe (Sep 15, 2020)

“Even as we make difficult decisions about going to war, we must also think clearly about how we fight it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (December 2009)
Context: Let me make one final point about the use of force. Even as we make difficult decisions about going to war, we must also think clearly about how we fight it.

“[W]e should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Barry Schwartz 17

Related quotes

Related topics