Top 40 Maria Konnikova Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s powerful advice. How often do we go off on someone for making a decision that we, personally, wouldn’t have made, calling them an idiot, fuming, getting angry? How much time and emotional energy we’d save if we simply learned to ask ourselves why they acted as they did, rather than judge, make presumptions, and react.”

— Maria Konnikova

2. “The benefit of failure is an objectivity that success simply can’t offer.”

— Maria Konnikova

3. “Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads,” Erik tells me. “Thinking that way won’t get you anywhere. You know about the randomness of it but it doesn’t help to think about it. You want to make sure you’re not the person in the poker room saying, ‘Can you believe what happened?’ That’s the other people.”

— Maria Konnikova

4. “In his Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposes betting as an antidote to one of the great ills of society: false confidence bred from an ignorance of the probabilistic nature of the world, from a desire to see black and white where we should rightly see gray.”

— Maria Konnikova

5. “The more you learn, that harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are.”

— Maria Konnikova

6. “It’s called the description-experience gap. In study after study, people fail to internalize numeric rules, making decisions based on things like “gut feeling” and “intuition” and “what feels right” rather than based on the data they are shown. We need to train ourselves to see the world in a probabilistic light – and even then, we often ignore the numbers in favor of our own experience.”

— Maria Konnikova

7. “Attention is a limited resource.”

— Maria Konnikova

8. “As the popular saying among scientists goes: genes load the gun; the environment pulls the trigger. The exact same traits could easily be put to use in more or less devious ways. The choice is not predetermined. And the presence of Machiavellianism or psychopathy or narcissism no more marks someone as a grifter than the presence of charisma or nonchalance.”

— Maria Konnikova

9. “People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did – well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.”

— Maria Konnikova

10. “He called it “egocentric anchoring”: we are our own point of departure. We assume that others know what we know, believe what we believe, and like what we like.”

— Maria Konnikova

11. “Less certainty, more inquiry”:.”

— Maria Konnikova

12. “To do nothing is within the power of all men.”

— Maria Konnikova

13. “The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became: the participants grew increasingly less likely to switch to winning stocks, instead doubling down on losers or gravitating entirely toward bonds.”

— Maria Konnikova

14. “We want to learn to pay attention better, to become superior observers, but we can’t hope to achieve this if we thoughtlessly pay attention to everything. That’s self-defeating. What we need to do is allocate our attention mindfully.”

— Maria Konnikova

15. “Whatever the situation, answering the question of what, specifically, you want to accomplish will put you well on your way to knowing how to maximize your limited attentional resources. It will help direct your mind, prime it, so to speak, with the goals and thoughts that are actually important – and help put those that aren’t into the background.”

— Maria Konnikova

16. “A change in perspective, in physical location, quite simply forces mindfulness. It forces us to reconsider the world, to look at things from a different angle. And sometimes that change in perspective can be the spark that makes a difficult decision manageable, or that engenders creativity where none existed before.”

— Maria Konnikova

17. “Facts are up for debate. Stories are far trickier.”

— Maria Konnikova

18. “The simple truth is that most people aren’t out to get you. We are so bad at spotting deception because it’s better for us to be more trusting. Trust, and not adeptness at spotting deception, is the more evolutionarily beneficial path.”

— Maria Konnikova

19. “Mastery is always a struggle for balance. How much time do you devote to the craft, and how much to yourself? And can you really do one without the other?”

— Maria Konnikova

20. “At some point, everyone will be deceived. Everyone will fall victim to a confidence artist of one stripe or another. Everyone will fall for it. The real question is why. And can you ever understand your own mind well enough that you learn to extricate yourself before it’s too late?”

— Maria Konnikova

21. “When it comes to you, I see clearly. When it comes to myself, I see what I want.”

— Maria Konnikova

22. “Whatever I may think about God, I believe in randomness. In the noise of the universe that chugs along caring nothing about us, our plans, our desires, our motivations, our actions. The noise that will be there regardless of what we choose or don’t choose to do. Variance. Chance. That thing we can’t control no matter how we may try. But can you really blame us for trying?”

— Maria Konnikova

23. “Gullibility may be deeply engrained in the human behavioral repertoire.”

— Maria Konnikova

24. “Why do we so often fail at this final stage of perception? The answer lies in that very element we were discussing: engagement.”

— Maria Konnikova

25. “You can’t control what will happen, so it makes no sense to try to guess at it. Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal. Without us to supply meaning, it’s simple noise. The most we can do is learn to control what we can – our thinking, our decision processes, our reactions.”

— Maria Konnikova

26. “Poker isn’t just about calibrating the strength of your beliefs. It’s also about becoming comfortable with the fact that there’s no such thing as a sure thing – ever. You will never have all the information you want, and you will have to act all the same. Leave your certainty at the door.”

— Maria Konnikova

27. “The confidence game – the con – is an exercise in soft skills. Trust, sympathy, persuasion. The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give. He doesn’t have to threaten us. We supply the story ourselves. We believe because we want to, not because anyone made us. And so we offer up whatever they want – money, reputation, trust, fame, legitimacy, support – and we don’t realize what is happening until it is too late.”

— Maria Konnikova

28. “If you want to be a good player, you just acknowledge that you’re not ‘due’ – for good cards, good karma, good health, money, love, or whatever else it is.”

— Maria Konnikova

29. “Do we see ourselves as victims or victors? A victim: The cards went against me. Things are being done to me, things are happening around me, and I am neither to blame nor in control. A victor: I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under.”

— Maria Konnikova

30. “Therein lies the power of the tale: it is a story of your exceptionalism.”

— Maria Konnikova

31. “A helpful exercise is to describe the situation from the beginning, either out loud or in writing, as if to a stranger who isn’t aware of any of the specifics – much like Holmes talks his theories through out loud to Watson. When Holmes states his observations in this way, gaps and inconsistencies that weren’t apparent before come to the surface.”

— Maria Konnikova

32. “Never do anything, no matter how small it may seem, without asking why, precisely, you’re doing it.”

— Maria Konnikova

33. “You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.”

— Maria Konnikova

34. “Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat.”

— Maria Konnikova

35. “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.” The language we use becomes our mental habits – and our mental habits determine how we learn, how we grow, what we become.”

— Maria Konnikova

36. “Through that journey, I hoped to learn how to make the best decisions I possibly could, not just at the card table but in the world. Through poker, I wanted to tame luck – to learn to make a difference even when the deck seemed stacked against me.”

— Maria Konnikova

37. “How could you ever hope to separate the random from the intentional?”

— Maria Konnikova

38. “Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well. It’s why disentangling chance from skill is so difficult in everyday decisions: it’s a statistical undertaking, and one we are not normally equipped to deal with.”

— Maria Konnikova

39. “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”

— Maria Konnikova

40. “We can’t control the variance. We can’t control what happens. But we can control our attention and how we choose to deploy it.”

— Maria Konnikova

41. “Human beings don’t like to exist in a state of uncertainty or ambiguity. When something doesn’t make sense, we want to supply the missing link. When we don’t understand what or why or how something happened, we want to find the explanation.”

— Maria Konnikova