We do not what we ought, What we ought not, we do, And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through.

We never do what we wish when we wish it, and when we desire a thing earnestly, and it does arrive, that or we are changed, so that we slide from the summit of our wishes and find ourselves where we were.

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

Anyone can see that intending and not acting when we can is not really intending, and loving and not doing good when we can is not really loving.

It does not undo harm to acknowledge that we have done it; but it undoes us not to acknowledge it.

We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.

We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Sometimes it's what you don't do that makes you who you are.

Thinking doesn't guarantee that we won't make mistakes. But not thinking guarantees that we will.

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens

‎If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen.

We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible

También conseguimos engañar a nuestra memoria. A fuerza de repetirnos lo que hubiéramos debido hacer, termina por parecernos imposible no haberlo hecho.

The fact that the biosphere responds unpredictably to our actions is not an argument for inaction. It is, however, a powerful argument for caution, and for adopting a tentative attitude toward all we believe, and all we do. Unfortunately, our species has demonstrated a striking lack of caution in the past. It is hard to imagine that we will behave differently in the future.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds — and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.