Quotes from Daniel Todd Gilbert

As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an "anticipation machine," and "making future" is the most important thing it does.

We don't just treasure our memories; we are our memories

Indeed, feelings don't just matter–they are what mattering means.

What do psychology professors say when they pass each other in the hallway? "Hi, you're fine, how am I?" I know, I know. The joke isn't that funny.

If the goal of science is to make us feel awkward and ignorant in the presence of things we once understood perfectly well, then psychology has succeeded above all others.

most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions.

in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did

John Stuart Mill wrote, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

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.

The trouble is that we often don't remember them correctly.

Have you noticed how normally this line is moving?

Adults love to ask children idiotic questions so that we can chuckle when they give us idiotic answers.

Small children cannot say what they want to be later because they don't really understand what later means.7 So, like shrewd politicians, they ignore the question they are asked and answer the question they can.

For millions of years, human beings have conquered their ignorance by dividing the labor of discovery

The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.

In one study, researchers gave elderly residents of a local nursing home a houseplant. They told half the residents that they were in control of the plant's care and feeding (high-control group), and they told the remaining residents that a staff person would take responsibility for the plant's well-being (low-control group).41 Six months later, 30 percent of the residents in the low-control group had died, compared with only 15 percent of the residents in the high-control group.

If there has ever been a group of human beings who prefer despair to delight, frustration to satisfaction, and pain to pleasure, they must be very good at hiding because no one has ever seen them.

For most of us, space is the concrete thing that time is like.3 Studies reveal that people all over the world imagine time as though it were a spatial dimension, which is why we say that the past is behind us and the future is in front of us, that we are moving toward our senescence and looking back on our infancy, and that days pass