Quotes from Daniel Gilbert

the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope.

You may think yellow is a color, but it isn't. It's a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light with a wavelength of 580 nanometers.

Surprise tells us that we were expecting something other than what we got, even when we didn't know we were expecting anything at all.

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.

machines and invertebrates prove that it doesn't take a smart, self-aware, conscious brain to make simple predictions

Surprise is an emotion we feel when we encounter the unexpected

At some point between our high chairs and our rocking chairs, we learn about later.

Unfortunately, even big ideas leave no fossils for carbon dating

The frontal lobe is the recent addition to the human brain that allows us to imagine the future.

Similarly, the cocaine experience is not the kitten-fur experience, which is not the promotion experience, but all are forms of feeling that occupy different points on a scale of happiness.

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

not thinking about the future is much more challenging than being a psychology professor.

Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double the juice from half the fruit.

events that challenge our optimistic beliefs can sometimes make us more rather than less optimistic.

human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way

human beings come into the world with a passion for control

Who thus define it, say they more or less / Than this, that happiness is happiness?

But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference.

if you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.

will not tremble," Cicero wrote in the first century BC, "however much it is tortured.

within a couple of weeks even earthquake survivors return to their normal level of unfounded optimism.

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. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

Forestalling pleasure is an inventive technique for getting double

Clarke's first law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.