Quotes about advice

I'm a great believer in asking everyone for an opinion before I make a decision. ... I ask and I ask and I ask, until I begin to get a gut feeling about something. And that's when I make a decision. I have learned much more from conducting my own random surveys than I could ever have learned from the greatest of consulting firms.

“He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless.”

Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice.

[N]ever engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.

The tragedy of virtue is that the more obvious, boring, unoriginal, and sermonizing the proverb, the harder it is to implement.

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

Delivering advice assumes that our cognitive apparatus rather than our emotional machinery exerts some meaningful control over our actions.

Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears, and so preparing the way for you later on. Sisters are women first, and sisters afterwards; and you will find that you do yourself harm.

I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.

When women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.

Let this be a lesson to you. Learn by my bad example. Never let an oaf cause you to lose your judgment.

I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.