Top 40 Kathryn Schulz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Wow. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.”

— Kathryn Schulz

2. “Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly, it reminds us that we know that we could do better.”

— Kathryn Schulz

3. “We’re terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don’t know.”

— Kathryn Schulz

4. “Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong.”

— Kathryn Schulz

5. “The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is. It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.”

— Kathryn Schulz

6. “We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesen’t remind us what we did badly, it reminds us what we know we could do better.”

— Kathryn Schulz

7. “First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don’t get much airtime in day-to-day life. What’s the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we’re at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?”

— Kathryn Schulz

8. “The point isn’t to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.”

— Kathryn Schulz

9. “Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.”

— Kathryn Schulz

10. “If you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It’s called a lobotomy.”

— Kathryn Schulz

11. “If it is sweet to be right, then – let’s not deny it – it is downright savory to point out that someone else is wrong.”

— Kathryn Schulz

12. “The inability to experience regret is one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths.”

— Kathryn Schulz

13. “Parading our own brilliance and exulting in other people’s errors is not very nice. For that matter, even wanting to parade our own brilliance and exult in other people’s errors is not very nice, although it is certainly very human.”

— Kathryn Schulz

14. “The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number.”

— Kathryn Schulz

15. “The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism – an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”

— Kathryn Schulz

16. “If you Google ‘regret and tattoo,’ you will get 11.5 million hits.”

— Kathryn Schulz

17. “But nor is the willing embrace of error always beyond us. In fact, this might be the most important thing illusions can teach us: that it is possible, at least some of the time, to find in being wrong a deeper satisfaction than we would have found in being right.”

— Kathryn Schulz

18. “Your own regrets may not be as ugly as you think they are.”

— Kathryn Schulz

19. “I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.”

— Kathryn Schulz

20. “Thirty-three percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education.”

— Kathryn Schulz

21. “This suggests a curious paradox. If art arises from our fundamental isolation in our own minds – from the way we are denied direct access to the world and all its contents – it also temporarily frees us from that isolation. Art lets us live, for a little while, in other worlds, including in other people’s inner worlds; we can hear their thoughts, feel their emotions, even believe their beliefs.”

— Kathryn Schulz

22. “Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.”

— Kathryn Schulz

23. “The fact is, with the exception of our own minds, no power on earth has the consistent and absolute ability to convince us that we are wrong. However much we might be prompted by cues from other people or our environment, the choice to face up to error is ultimately ours alone.”

— Kathryn Schulz

24. “I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.”

— Kathryn Schulz

25. “There tore through me a transformation with the force of a river which, dammed up and diverted for a lifetime, bursts its way back to its true channel. I became what I was. I ceased to be what I was not.”

— Kathryn Schulz

26. “The world is outside us; our senses are within us. How, then, do the two come together so that we can know something? Obviously our senses can’t go forth and drag an actual chunk if the world back to their internal lair, intact and as is, for the benefit of the rest if the brain.”

— Kathryn Schulz

27. “Freud, as I’ve already noted, believed that the false worlds of our dreams reveal deep and hidden truths about ourselves.”

— Kathryn Schulz

28. “As with scientists, so too with the rest of us. Sometimes in life we find ourselves between jobs, and sometimes we find ourselves between lovers, and sometimes we find ourselves between homes. But we almost never find ourselves between theories. Rather than assess a belief on its own merits, we choose among beliefs, clinging to our current ones until something better comes along.”

— Kathryn Schulz

29. “This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from the truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it.”

— Kathryn Schulz

30. “If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people’s stories – which is to say, other people – cease to matter to us.”

— Kathryn Schulz

31. “Our brains are not actually duplex apartments occupied by feuding neighbors, and how we bring about the complicated act of deceiving ourselves remains a mystery.”

— Kathryn Schulz

32. “We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look into our beliefs and see reality.”

— Kathryn Schulz

33. “We live remarkable lives because life itself is remarkable, a fact that is impossible not to notice if only suffering leaves us alone for long enough.”

— Kathryn Schulz

34. “One consequence of losing a parent – obvious enough, although it hadn’t occurred to me beforehand – is that it reconfigures the rest of your family. All my life, it had been the four of us; to the extent that had ever changed, it had only been joyfully, in the direction of more. But part of mourning my father involved acclimating to a new family geometry, a triangle instead of a square. As a unit, we were smaller, differently balanced, and, at first, unavoidably sadder.”

— Kathryn Schulz

35. “I lost my father; my father lost everything. That is the absolute loss that his silence in the hospital foretold: the end of the mind, the end of the self, the end of being a part of all of this – the harbor, the city, the poetry, the world. “He became his admirers,” a different poet, W. H. Auden, wrote of Yeats when the latter died. Now we who loved my father are all that is left of him.”

— Kathryn Schulz

36. “Grief, by contrast, is a private experience, unconstrained by ritual or time. Popular wisdom will tell you that it comes in stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and that may be true. But the Paleozoic era also came in stages – Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian – and it lasted two hundred and ninety million years.”

— Kathryn Schulz

37. “Often, our beliefs about what is factually right and our beliefs about what is morally right are entirely inextricable.”

— Kathryn Schulz

38. “Life, too, goes by contraries. It is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting. We can’t get away from this constant amalgamation of feeling, can’t strain out the ostensible impurities in pursuit of some imaginary essence. And we shouldn’t want to if we could. The world, in all its complexities, calls on us to respond in kind. So that to be conflicted is not to be adulterated – it is to be complete.”

— Kathryn Schulz

39. “Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future.”

— Kathryn Schulz

40. “Think about the telling fact that error literally doesn’t exist in the first person present tense: the sentence “I am wrong” describes a logical impossibility. As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.”

— Kathryn Schulz

41. “So many losses routinely precede the final one now: loss of memory, mobility, autonomy, physical strength, intellectual aptitude, a longtime home, the kind of identity derived from vocation, whole habits of being, and perhaps above all a certain forward-tilting sense of self – the feeling that we are still becoming, that there are things left in this world we may yet do.”

— Kathryn Schulz

42. “Our mistakes show us that the contents of our minds can be as convincing as reality.”

— Kathryn Schulz

43. “But, like Anteros, it is largely overlooked in our culture, victim of the general consensus that happiness is pleasant but uninteresting.”

— Kathryn Schulz

44. “The best eyewitnesses got more than 25 percent of the facts wrong. The worst erred 80 percent of the time.”

— Kathryn Schulz

45. “Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”

— Kathryn Schulz

46. “As bats are batty and slugs are sluggish, our own species is synonymous with screwing up.”

— Kathryn Schulz

47. “So I should revise myself: it does feel like something to be wrong. It feels like being right.”

— Kathryn Schulz

48. “For now, at least, the world is ours to notice and to change, and that seems to me sufficient. It is true that loss will ultimately part us from it, but it is also true, as I said earlier, that we have many bindings. Our works of art, our honorable deeds, our acts of kindness and generosity; all of these link us in unseen ways to future generations.”

— Kathryn Schulz

49. “This idea inverts the logic of Elizabeth Bishop: our largest losses, it suggests, can help us cope with our smaller ones, by putting them in perspective.”

— Kathryn Schulz