Quotes from Daniel M. Gilbert

So what motivates people to work hard every day to do things that will satisfy the economy's needs but not their own? Like so many thinkers, Smith believed that people want just one thing—happiness—hence economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy.14 If and only if people hold this false belief will they do enough producing, procuring, and consuming to sustain their economies.

To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine-ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn't and has never been, but as it might be. The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.

The bottom line is this: 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.

Now, some people will bemoan this fact, wag their fingers in your direction, and tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show that some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice. The

We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Each serves a purpose, each imposes a limit on the influence of the other, and our experience of the world is the artful compromise that these tough competitors negotiate.

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.40 And occasionally dead.

most people do pretty well when things go pretty bad.

We are not merely spectators of the world but investors in it

Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist's hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.

We use our eyes to look into space and our imaginations to look into time.

We expect the next car, the next house or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't

Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.

The word experience comes from the Latin experientia, meaning 'to try', whereas the word aware comes from the Greek horan, meaning 'to see'. Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies observation of an event.

We don't always see ourselves as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique. Even when we do precisely what others do, we tend to think that we're doing it for unique reasons.

The principles that explain why some genes are transmitted more successfully than others also explain why some beliefs are transmitted more successfully than others.

The poet John Keats noted that whereas great authors are 'capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason', the rest of us are 'incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge'.39

But the agricultural, industrial, and technological revolutions changed all that, and the resulting explosion of personal liberty has created a bewildering array of options, alternatives, choices, and decisions that our ancestors never faced. For the very first time, our happiness is in our hands.

the fundamental needs of a vibrant economy and the fundamental needs of a happy individual are not necessarily the same.

If the past is a wall with some holes, the future is a hole with no walls.

Memory uses the filling-in trick, but imagination is the filling-in trick

There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.

People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end.

memory does not store a feature-length film of our experience but instead stores an idiosyncratic synopsis

The historian Will Durant performed the remarkable feat of summarizing Kant's point in a single sentence: 'The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost–one might say–a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli.