Quotes from Daniel Gilbert

Indeed, thinking about the future can be so pleasurable that sometimes we'd rather think about it than get there.

the feeling of control—whether real or illusory—is one of the wellsprings of mental health.

Your emotions are meant to fluctuate, just like your blood pressure is meant to fluctuate. It's a system that's supposed to move back and forth, between happy and unhappy. That's how the system guides you through the world.

The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what they eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.

when we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes.

anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact.

When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won't really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that happen later.

In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavors, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.

Small children cannot say what they want to be later because they don't really understand what later means.

A permanent present—what a haunting phrase.

Despite the third word of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy. Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you've bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why.

As students of the silver screen recall, Bogart's admonition about future regret led Bergman to board the plane and fly away with her husband. Had she stayed with Bogey in Casablanca, she would probably have felt just fine. Not right away, perhaps, but soon, and for the rest of her life.

When a fruit salad, a lover, or a jazz trio is just too imperfect for our tastes, we stop eating, kissing, and listening. But the law of large numbers suggests that when a measurement is too imperfect for our tastes, we should not stop measuring. Quite the opposite - we should measure again and again until niggling imperfections yield to the onslaught of data.

The key to happiness, fulfilment and enlightenment, the ex-professor argued, was to stop thinking so much about the future.

Later! What an astonishing idea. What a powerful concept. What a fabulous discovery.

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.

What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning? Both, of course, are intimately connected to thinking about the future.

This frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.

As soon as our potential experience becomes our actual experience—as soon as we have a stake in its goodness—our brains get busy looking for ways to think about the experience that will allow us to appreciate it.

fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives.

we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off.

Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable.

This is when I learned that mistakes are interesting and began planning a life that contained several of them.

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. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an "anticipation machine," and "making future" is the most important thing it does.2