Daniel Gilbert Quotes
We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.
The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.
People are happiest when they're trying to achieve goals that are difficult but not out of reach.
People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be a means to that end.
The good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.
The secret of happiness is variety, but the secret of variety, like the secret of all spices, is knowing when to use it.
Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.
We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy
If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.
My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.
The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.
The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
Daniel Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The organized Mind is smart, important, and, as always, exquisitely written.
The price we pay for our irresponsible explanatory urge is that we often spoil our most pleasant experiences by making good sense of them.
The data says that with the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happiness. If you're rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness. But in both cases, money does it.
Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities-minds unlike any others-and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.
The eye and brain are conspirators, and, like most conspiracies, theirs is negotiated behind closed doors, in the back room, outside of our awareness.
The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
To learn from experience, we must remember it, and, for a variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend.
We don't believe other people's experiences can tell us all that much about our own. I think this is an illusion of uniqueness.
Humans react to danger when it is immediate, immoral, visible... Global warming does not press any of those buttons.
Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy-not to mention more attractive-than the average person.
Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.
Variety improves the things that we do too often, but it rules the things that we don't do often enough.
Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
We humans can look deep into future and predict what will happen, but then turn around and do nothing about it.
Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.
Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist’s hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed
