Top 50 Jonah Lehrer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Grit is the stubborn refusal to quit.”

— Jonah Lehrer

Featured in: Quitting Quotes

2. “Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.”

— Jonah Lehrer

3. “People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.”

— Jonah Lehrer

4. “And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.”

— Jonah Lehrer

5. “Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It’s almost like magic.”

— Jonah Lehrer

6. “The best way to solve a problem? Try explaining it to somebody outside your field.”

— Jonah Lehrer

7. “We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don’t know what we’re talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.”

— Jonah Lehrer

8. “Creativity is a catchall term for a variety of distinct thought processes.”

— Jonah Lehrer

9. “When the mind is denied the emotional sting of losing, it never figures out how to win.”

— Jonah Lehrer

10. “Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we’re rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.”

— Jonah Lehrer

11. “While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music.”

— Jonah Lehrer

12. “A lie told well is just as good as the truth.”

— Jonah Lehrer

13. “In fact, the only way to remain creative over time – to not be undone by our expertise – is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don’t fully understand.”

— Jonah Lehrer

14. “Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill.”

— Jonah Lehrer

15. “You know more than you know.”

— Jonah Lehrer

16. “The answer will only arrive after we stop looking for it.”

— Jonah Lehrer

17. “To have a style is to be stuck.”

— Jonah Lehrer

18. “It’s a hard thing to describe. It’s just this sense that you got something to say.”

— Jonah Lehrer

19. “In particular, Vaillant says, it is the experience of loving and being loved that most closely predicts how we react to the hardships of life; human attachments are the ultimate source of resilience. “The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points, at least to me, to a straightforward five-word conclusion,” Vaillant writes. “’Happiness equals love. Full stop.”

— Jonah Lehrer

20. “If you’re trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.”

— Jonah Lehrer

21. “For too long, we’ve assumed that there is a single template for human nature, which is why we diagnose most deviations as disorders. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of minds. And that’s a very good thing.”

— Jonah Lehrer

22. “The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity.”

— Jonah Lehrer

23. “When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.”

— Jonah Lehrer

24. “Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new.”

— Jonah Lehrer

25. “The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.”

— Jonah Lehrer

26. “Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.”

— Jonah Lehrer

27. “Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true.”

— Jonah Lehrer

28. “It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.”

— Jonah Lehrer

29. “I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I’d be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn’t good at science. I didn’t have the discipline for it.”

— Jonah Lehrer

30. “People who are more rational don’t perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better.”

— Jonah Lehrer

31. “By the age of 3, children from wealthier households hear, on average, about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. The ratio is reversed in households on welfare.”

— Jonah Lehrer

32. “Cities force us to interact with strangers and with the strange. They pry the mind open. And that is why they are the idea that has unleashed so many of our new ideas.”

— Jonah Lehrer

33. “Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we’ve hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next.”

— Jonah Lehrer

34. “Children can’t help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.”

— Jonah Lehrer

35. “Rejection process is not fun. It’s the red pen on the page, the discarded sketch, sometimes is the only way forward.”

— Jonah Lehrer

36. “What you discover when you look at creativity from the perspective of the brain is that it is universal. We’re all creative all of the time, we can’t help but be creative.”

— Jonah Lehrer

37. “I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.”

— Jonah Lehrer

38. “The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.”

— Jonah Lehrer

39. “Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order.”

— Jonah Lehrer

40. “Money chases good ideas.”

— Jonah Lehrer

41. “Love is just another name for what never gets old.”

— Jonah Lehrer

42. “Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision. But don’t try to analyze the information with your conscious mind. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.”

— Jonah Lehrer

43. “When you overthink at the wrong moment, you cut yourself off from the wisdom of your emotions, which are much better at assessing actual preferences. You lose the ability to know what you really want. And then you choose the worst strawberry jam.”

— Jonah Lehrer

44. “Trusting one’s emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice.”

— Jonah Lehrer

45. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on my dopamine neurons.”

— Jonah Lehrer

46. “The world is more random than we can imagine. That’s what our emotions can’t understand.”

— Jonah Lehrer

47. “Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from cellular error. Mistakes aren’t things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated.”

— Jonah Lehrer

48. “If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it’s Finnegan’s Wake.”

— Jonah Lehrer

49. “Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.”

— Jonah Lehrer

50. “The benefit of such horizontal interactions – people sharing knowledge across fields – is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.”

— Jonah Lehrer