without being sure of something, we can not begin to think about everything elses

Error ... is less an intellectual problem than an existential one - a crisis not in what we know, but in who we are. We hear something of that identity crisis in the questions we ask ourselves in the aftemath of error: What was I thinking? How could I have done that?

Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong

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.

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

If you Google 'regret and tattoo,' you will get 11.5 million hits.

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.

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

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.

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

wrongness always seems to come at us from left field - that is, from outside ourselves. But the reality could hardly be more different. Error is the ultimate inside job. Yes, the world can be profoundly confusing and yes, other people can mislead or deceive you. In the end, though, nobody but you can choose to believe your own beliefs.

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

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

Wow. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, “Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

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.

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.